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Full text of "Gilles Deleuze, Constantin V. Boundas Empiricism And
Subjectivity
"
See other formats
EUROPEAN PERSPECTIVES E M P | R | @ | S M
A Series in Social Philosophy and Cultural Criticism
LAWRENCE D. KriTzZMAN AND RicHarD WoL, Eprrors A N D S U B J F C T | V | T Y
European Perspectives seeks to make available works of interdisciplinary in AN ESSAY ON
terest by leading European thinkers. By presenting classic texts and out
standing contemporary works, the series hopes to shape the major intellec- HUME’S THEORY OF HUMAN NATURE
tual controversies of our day and thereby to facilitate the tasks of historical
understanding.
Theodor W. Adorno Notes to Literature G ILLES D ELEUZE
Julia Kristeva Strangers to Ourselves
‘TRANSLATED AND WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
CONSTANTIN V. BOUNDAS
bifind
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS
NEW YORK
‘
i
|
|
\
CONTENTS
Preface to the English-Language Edition - ix
Gilles Deleuze
Translator’s Acknowledgments °- xi
TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION = 1
Deleuze, Empiricism, and the Struggle for Subjectivity
ONE + 21
The Problem of Knowledge and the Problem of Ethics
TWO - 37
Cultural World and General Rules
THREE : 55
The Power of the Imagination in Ethics and Knowledge
FOUR : 73
God and the World
FIVE - 85
Empiricism and Subjectivity
SIX - 105
Principles of Human Nature
CONCLUSION + 123
Purposiveness
NOTES - 135
INDEX - 155
PREFACE TO THE
ENGLISH-LANGUAGE
EDITION
WE DREAM SOMETIMES of a history of philosophy that would list
only the new concepts created by a great philosopher—his most es-
sential and creative contribution. The case of Hume could begin to
be made with the following list:
—He established the concept of belief and put it in the place of
knowledge. He laicized belief, turning knowledge into a legitimate
belief. He asked about the conditions which legitimate belief, and
on the basis of this investigation sketched out a theory of probabilities.
The consequences are important: if the act of thinking is belief,
thought has fewer reasons to defend itself against error than against
illusion. Ulegitimate beliefs perhaps inevitably surround thought like
a cloud of illusions. In this respect, Hume anticipates Kant. An entire
art and all sorts of rules will be required in order to distinguish
between legitimate beliefs and the illusions which accompany them.
—He gave the association of ideas its real meaning, making it a
practice of cultural and conventional formations (conventional instead
of contractual), rather than a theory of the human mind. Hence, the
association of ideas exists for the sake of law, political economy,
aesthetics, and so on. People ask, for example, whether it is enough
to shoot an arrow at a site in order to become its owner, or whether
© one should touch the spot with one’s own hand. This is a question
PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH-LANGUAGE EDITION
about the correct association between a person and a thing, for the
person to become the owner of the thing.
—He created the first great logic of relations, showing in it that
all relations (not only “matters of fact” but also relations among
ideas) are external to their terms. As a result, he constituted a mul-
tifarious world of experience based upon the principle of the exte-
riority of relations. We start with atomic parts, but these atomic
parts have transitions, passages, “tendencies,” which circulate from
one to another. These tendencies give rise to habits. Isn’t this the
answer to the question “what are we?” We are habits, nothing but
habits—the habit of saying “I.” Perhaps, there is no more striking
answer to the problem of the Self.
We could certainly prolong this list, which already testifies to the
genius of Hume.
Gilles Deleuze 1989
TRANSLATOR’S
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I aM INDEBTED to Jacqueline Code, Allison van Rooy, and Réal Fillion
for their invaluable help with earlier drafts of this translation. Susan
Dyrkton, as she has done so often before, gave me her sound editorial
advice and her friendship, and I am grateful for both gifts. To Marg
Tully, probably the most frequently acknowledged typist in the
Academy and certainly one among the most deserving acknowledg-
ment, a sincere expression of thanks. The completion of the present
translation was greatly facilitated by a sabbatical leave granted me
by Trent University during the academic year 1989-1990, and I am
thankful for it. I am also grateful to Professors Francois Laruelle and
Anne-Frangoise Schmid-Laruelle for their hospitality in Paris, and
for the time they so kindly spent with me, without which my un-
derstanding of the rhizome named “Deleuze” and of the articula-
tions of the sprawling philosophies of difference would have been
much poorer than they are now. Above all, to Linda Carol Conway,
who effortlessly knows how to build with childhood blocks and how
to become like everybody else, until we meet again, a heartfelt
“thank you.”
xt
EMPIRICISM
AND SUBJECTIVITY
TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION
DELEUZE, EMPIRICISM,
AND THE STRUGGLE
FOR SUBJECTIVITY
I
Every history of philosophy has its chapter on empiri-
cism. ... But in Hume there is something very strange
which completely displaces empiricism, giving it a new
power, a theory and practice of relations, of the AND. ...
—Gilles Deleuze—Claire Parnet, Dialogues
THE THEORY AND politics of paratactic discourse, or of the minor
stuttering in one’s own language to which these lines allude, are
likely to evoke today [1990] the adventures of The Logic of Sense
(1969), the assemblages of Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (1975),
and the body without organs of the A Thousand Plateaus (1980). But
in fact the quotation implicates a much earlier segment of the De-
leuzian diagram of this discourse, inscribed with the name of Hume,
and this implication has yet to receive the attention it deserves. It
seems likely that a mindful consideration of this segment, in con-
junction perhaps with the segment-Bergson! and the segment-Leib-
niz,? may begin to pay attractive dividends toward a more accurate
charting of Deleuze’s nomadic image of thought. Next to the lit-
erary, linguistic, and psychoanalytic bodies of délire, recently unveiled
by Jean-Jacques Lecercle,? a philosophical body will then begin to
take shape, and Deleuze’s reasons for having assiduously tended to
it over the last thirty-six years will emerge progressively into a
stronger light.
One of bis last books in circulation today to be translated into
English, Empiricism and Subjectivity is Deleuze’s second in a long list
of book-length publications, initiated in 1952 and still being aug-
TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION
mented at regular intervals.* This small book appeared in the Col-
lection “Epiméthée” of the Presses Universitaires de France in 1953.
One year before, in collaboration with André Cresson, Deleuze had
released in the “Collection Philosophes” of the same house another
book entitled David Hume: Sa Vie, son oeuvre, avec un exposé de sa
philosophie. In one of its chapters, “Complément sur l’oeuvre,” to-
day’s reader can easily recognize Deleuze’s pen at work in the con-
struction of a less elaborate version of the elegant discussion of
Hume which was going to be deployed, within one year, in Em-
piricism and Subjectivity. In 1972, Deleuze returns to Hume in a
chapter-long contribution to the Histoire de la philosophie, then edited
by Francois Chatelet on behalf of Hachette Littérature.* One can
find here a much abbreviated version of the 1953 book, but with no
significant departure from any of the major points of its extended
argument.
To this day, Deleuze has not revisited Hume, with the exception
of some reminiscing references to his own earlier writings,® made
often in the context of “the thought from Outside” which has always
fascinated him and informed his rhizomatic theory and practice.
Hume is curiously absent from the series of memories/tributes of
the One Thousand Plateaus,’ to the point that an argumentum e silentio
could be made, suggesting that a youthful enthusiasm with Hume
had faded away. But such an argument, I think, would be missing
the point, for the intensity named “Hume” has not ceased to resonate
throughout Deleuze’s writings. Named or not, the intensive en-
counter with Hume gave Deleuze a decisive and unbending pref-
erence for empiricism against all forms of transcendental philosophy.
Acknowledged or not, the empiricist principle of difference, along
with the theorem of the externality of all relations® which was de-
rived from it, strengthened Deleuze’s choice of minoritarian
discourse? and fed into the problematic of paratactic serializations.'
Finally, whether marked or unmarked, the resources of Hume con-
solidated Deleuze’s opposition to the petitio principii of all theories
endowing the transcendental field with the very subjective (egolog-
ical and personological) coordinates the constitution of which should
rather be accounted for and explained. The same resources “‘moti-
vated” Deleuze’s relentless quest for an “activated” and mind-tran-
scending subject whose pathways would avoid the transcendental
turn.'!
TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION
II
The concept exists just as much in empiricism as in ra-
tionalism, but it has a completely different nature: it is a
being-multiple, instead of being-one, a being-whole or
being as subject. Empiricism is fundamentally linked to
a logic—a logic of multiplicities (of which relations are
only one aspect).
—Gilles Deleuze, Preface to the English
Language Edition of the Dialogues
The determination of Deleuze’s place in the mindscape of the new
French theory will always require complex and delicate negotiations;
that his place, though, is prominent in it is not under dispute. It is
therefore strange to observe that the frequently noticed new French
theoretical bend toward empiricism has not yet generated discussions
worthy of the intense interest in it by one of its leading contributors.
Even Deleuze’s reiteration of his continuing allegiance to empiricism
made in the Preface to the English Language Edition of his Dialogues
with Claire Parnet has not lifted the silence.
Nevertheless, signposts, indicating that empiricism has been more
than a whimsical choice in the post-structuralist range of options,
are not lacking. For example, in V. Descombes’s helpful compen-
dium of Modern French Philosophy one finds a reference to Deleuze’s
project as a “‘search for a Transcendental Empiricism,” together with
the claim that, for Deleuze, philosophy is either dialectical or em-
piricist, “according to whether the difference between concept and
intuition . . . is taken to be a conceptual or a non-conceptual differ-
ence.”3 Derrida’s sibylline reference to empiricism as “the dream
of a purely heterological thought at its source” is also well known.
Indeed this reference is important enough to justify a more faithful
reproduction: “[Empiricism is a] pure thought of pure difference. . . .
We say the dream because it must vanish at daybreak, as soon as
language awakens.” “But perhaps,” continues Derrida, “one will
object that it is language which is sleeping. Doubtless, but then one
must, In a certain way, become classical once more, and again find
other grounds for the divorce between speech and thought. This
_ Toute is quite, perhaps too, abandoned today.””'* These lines were written
in 1967; Descombes repeated them in 1979.15 I have often wondered
TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION
why the alternative route, created by Deleuze in 1953, was not kept
open or traveled more frequently.
Truth to tell, a few commentators did make the point that the
new French theoretical interest in empiricism indicates an active
search for a ground which, unlike transcendental fields, would be
hospitable to rhizomatic synapses and diagrammatic displacements."
But no one matched Deleuze’s ability to seize this interest and to
turn it into a war machine against the verities and the evidences
constituting the object of the famous [conscious] phenomenological
gaze. In assembling this war machine, Deleuze mobilized all those
who, along with Lucretius, Hume, Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Bergson,
share ‘“‘a secret bond formed by the critique of the negative, the
culture of joy, the hatred of interiority, the externality of forces and
relations, and the denunciation of power . . .””7 In this context, De-
leuze has often confessed his low tolerance for the scholastic tactics
of phenomenology which enshrine common and good sense.'* In
more argumentative moments—in The Logic of Sense, for instance—
encounters with Husserl fueled a sustained critique of phenome-
nology, exposing the latter’s fixation on the evidences of conscious-
ness, its fatal surrender to the doxic element of common and good
sense, and above all, the fraudulent duplication of the empirical do-
main by a transcendental field endowed with personal and egological
dimensions. According to Deleuze, these dimensions still represent
phenomenology’s unreduced and uncritical presuppositions."
Of course, Deleuze’s war machine, mounted on empiricist lines
and aimed at phenomenology (or hermeneutics) is not fueled with
unmitigated invective. Husserl is not exactly treated like a schoolboy
in The Logic of Sense, nor can one easily overlook Deleuze’s powerful
and elegant phenomenological descriptions in the essay on Michel
Tournier, even if those descriptions, in the long run, are made to
stand on their heads.*° The elucidation of the struggles for subjec-
tivity in Deleuze’s later works, built as they are around the notions
“fold” and “folding,” has clear and acknowledged connections with
Heidegger (Zwiefalt) and Merleau-Ponty (pli, plissement).?! Tempting,
though, as it may be—and even fashionably ecumenical??—I would
not want to interpret these gestures as indications of a Deleuzian
program for the radicalization of phenomenology. The radicalization
of phenomenology, Deleuze-style, amounts to the transformation of
phenomenology (and not only of a “vulgar” intentionalist reflection
TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION
of it) into an ontology of intensive forces, extended forms, and of
the “folding” or “internalization” of these forces and forms. And
neither intensive forces nor the “fold” are phenomena, “sensa,” or
cogitationes.*
The transition from phenomenology to nomadic sensation and
thought finds its mature moment in Deleuze’s enlisting Bergson in
the cause of radical empiricism.”* According to Deleuze, Bergson,
having questioned the privilege of natural perception and the sub-
ordination of movement to poses, creates the possibilities for an in-
vestigation of the “nonhuman” or “superhuman” originary world
wherein images move and collide in a state of universal variation
and undulation. This is a world with no axes, no centers, no ups or
downs. In his quest for the pure perception (the sentiendum), Bergson
breaks with the philosophic tradition which had assigned light to
the mind and conceived consciousness as a searchlight summoning
things up from their essential darkness. Unlike phenomenology,
which remained faithful to this tradition, Bergson’s vision solicited
things in their own luminosity. As for consciousness, instead of being
the light of the old image of thought, it is, for Bergson, an opaque
blade without which light would go on diffusing itself forever, never
reflected and never revealed. Deleuze subscribes to all these claims
and also to Bergson’s characterization of conscious perception as the
object perceived, minus the aspects of it which do not interest the
perceiver. Bergson and Deleuze, therefore, join hands in their de-
mand that consciousness be constituted. Beginning with the Abgrund
of an Empedoclean world of elements, consciousness must be ex-
posed as the center, the obstacle, and the “living image” which
blocks and reflects the light-lines hitherto diffused in every possible
direction. Deleuze’s later texts will reiterate this demand, and they
will designate subjectivity as the “fold” which bends and envelops
the forces of the Outside.”
This choice of empiricism over phenomenology in the context of
a new and more critical image of thought is bound to be resisted by
some, although the resistance, I suspect, will be based on a more
traditional access to empiricism, markedly different from that of
Deleuze. We will do well to remember that for Deleuze philo-
sophical mathesis has little to do with purported solutions or answers
_ and everything to do with the question and the problem, or the
ability of the problem to coordinate or serialize other questions
.
TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION
within its range of tonalities.2° Viewed from this perspective, the
textbook definition of empiricism, which attributes to experience
the origin and the source of validity of all possible knowledge, is,
in fact, an answer without a question. Strictly speaking, the definition
is not even plausible, because, despite what the definition implies,
knowledge does not represent the primary concern of the empiricists,
not does experience play the kind of constitutive role that textbooks
assign to it. Knowledge is not primary. Deleuze reminds us that
Hume was primarily a moralist, a historian, and a political philos-
opher who placed his epistemology in the service of these concerns.
Knowledge is possible because our passions provide our ideas with
associative links in view of our actions and ends. The practical in-
terest, being primary, activates the theoretical interest, and raises
sooner or later the delicate issue of how to harmonize nature and
human nature. What is often overlooked in our discussions of em-
piricism is that experience is not unambiguously constitutive. For if
by “experience” we mean atomic and distinct perceptions, the re-
lations which associate these perceptions to each other, creating
thereby an aura of belief and anticipation, cannot be accounted for.
This is because, in the opinion of Deleuze, Hume views relations as
the effects of the principles of human nature; he does not attempt
to derive them from our experience of atomic and distinct percep-
tions. Or again if by “experience” we mean the sum total of our
observations hitherto, general rules and principles will not be ac-
counted for, precisely because they themselves constitute experience
and cannot therefore be derived from it. Hence, a definition of em-
piricism, which does not first problematize the nature and status of
experience, is of little value.?”
A more helpful definition of empiricism, in Deleuze’s estimate,
must respect the irreducible dualism that exists between things and
relations, atoms and structure, perceptions and their causes, and also
relations and their causes. Viewed from this vantage point, empir-
icism will be the theory of the externality of relations, and con-
versely, all theories which entail the derivation of relation from the
nature of things would be resolutely nonempiricist. In the last anal-
ysis, Deleuze’s commitment to empiricism rests on his conviction
that relations are syntheses whose provenance cannot be explained
on the basis of the representationalist matrix idea/atom or mind/
collection of atoms. Relations are the effect of the principles of
6
TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION
human nature and the latter, as we shall see, constitute the subject
at the same time that they constitute relations.”
Thus, Deleuze’s essay shows empiricism to be marked by an ir-
reducible dualism between things and relations, and claims to capture
thereby the sense of Hume’s dual strategy of atomism (the different,
the disparate) and associationism (mise en série, parataxis.) For if ato-
mism “‘is the theory of ideas insofar as relations are external to them,
and associationism, the theory of relations insofar as they are external
to ideas, that is, insofar as they depend on (the principles of human
nature),”*? Hume, instead of pulverizing the given, as his critics often
allege, would have embarked upon the study of the mechanism
which allows atoms to fit in a structure. As long as the mind is a
collection of atoms in motion, and mover and motion indistinguish-
able from each other, and as long as the mind can be likened to
moving images without a frame to restrict their movement, Hume
can easily show that atomism is not a sufficient condition for the
constitution of a science of humanity. This science can be constituted
only after the naturalization of the mind as the result of the operation
of associative principles upon it—in other words, only after the con-
stitution of the subject inside the mind as the product of principles
of human nature transcending the mind.
Now, the reasons why the doctrine of the externality of relations,
rooted in atomism and introducing associationism, can contribute to
the critique of phenomenology or to the quest for the elemental
world of Bergson are found in two enabling premises that Hume
and Deleuze share. These are the principle of difference and the
serialization/compossibility of different elements.2° Empiricism, in
Deleuze’s reading of Hume, revolves around a principle of difference,
holding that the given is a collection of ideas separable because dif-
ferent, and different because separable. This principle of difference
requires that the mind be neither Subject nor Mirror of Nature. No
impression is ever adventitious; all impressions are, in some sense,
“Gnnate.’”>! Before the constitution of the Subject, no principle of
organization rules over the mind. Only the indivisibility of impres-
sions interests Hume, because it licenses his principle of difference
and guarantees that the only constants of the mind will be non
indivisible atoms. It follows, argues Deleuze, that empiricism is not
_a philosophy of the senses but a philosophy of the imagination, and
the statement that “all ideas are derived from impressions” is not
TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION
meant to enshrine representationalism but is rather a regulative prin-
ciple meant to keep us within the straight and narrow of the atomist
principle of difference.
Of course, difference alone does not make an empiricist philos-
ophy: difference and repetition are required to relate to each other
chiastically.22 From a host of differential perceptions, a subject is
born inside the given, and the imagination is transformed into a
faculty. Terms are related and serialized. When a law of reproduction
of representations is formed under the impact of the principles of
human nature, the subject comes to be, and begins to transcend the
mind; it goes beyond the given. But repetition cannot occur without
difference: the principles of human nature may well be the necessary
condition for relations in general, serializations in general, or the
advent of the structure-subject. However, particular relations and
actual subjects require concrete and different circumstances as their
sufficient conditions. Circumstances define passions and give direc-
tion to interests because affectivity and circumstance go together.
And given the primacy assigned to the practical interest over the
theoretical, the principles of passion are indispensable for the for-
mation of concrete associations, and therefore indispensable for the
constitution of the subject inside the mind.*
Ultimately, Deleuze’s choice of empiricism amounts to a choice
calculated to displace dialectics. The principle of difference that De-
leuze locates in the heart of the Humean text prevents the closure
threatened by dialectical sublation. Hypotactic subsumptions are re-
placed by paratactic conjunctions and arborite constructions give way
to the strategy of the AND. Repetition—time and also habit as rep-
etition—holds the paratactic series together, making possible their
convergence and compossibility as well as their divergence and res-
onance. Difference and repetition displace the dialectical labor of
the concept and thwart the mobilization of negation for the sake of
allegedly superior synthesis.
The choice of empiricism is nothing less than a choice for a critical
but nontranscendental philosophy. Transcendental philosophy, says
Deleuze, beginning with a methodologically reduced field from
which it derives essential certainty, asks how there can be a given,
or how a subject can give itself the given. But Hume’s empiricism
asks how a subject can be constituted inside the given. The subject
here is a task which must be fulfilled. In the process of fulfilling
this task, empiricism generates a critique of rules by means of rules:
TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION
extensive rules are criticized and rectified through the application of
corrective rules.>* But to the extent that both kinds of rules find
their origin in habit, the idea of an empiricist critique would be
impossible and unintelligible were it not for the fact that habit is
not solely the product of an experientially ascertained repetition of
similar cases. Habit can be formed by other kinds of repetition as
well. The task assumed by empiricism, therefore, is the constant
correction of the imagination by means of the understanding. Habit
extends the range of imagination but also corrects the accuracy of
judgment. Critique must discipline the anticipating subject and make
it focus on objects determined in accordance with the nature of the
understanding and the weight of observed repetitions; critique must
also educate the moral activity of the subject, that is, the act which
accords with the intensive integration of disparate sympathies. But
ultimately, Deleuze-Hume cannot prevent a paradox from being in-
scribed in the heart of empiricism: the same critique which disci-
plines the mind and prompts it to reject the fictions of the imagi-
nation is also the critique responsible for leading the mind to the
biggest of all fictions—Subject, World, and God—and for turning
these fictions into “incorrigible,” constitutive ideas. In opposition to
the prudential demarcation of ideas from concepts, which later on
will be the pride of the Kantian critique, the Deleuzian-Humean
empiricist critique will assign to the intensive idea the role of gen-
erating extensive concepts.*> With Hume, the boldest moment of
critical theory has come: the efficacy of the critique depends now
on a fiction.
III
Avoir des raisons pour croire c’est d’avoir un corps. Le
corps grec est une matiére informée par une belle forme;
il est le corps du savoir et de la croyance. Mais pour les
modernes, il y a du temps dans le corps. Le notre, c’est
un corps fragile, toujours fatigué. Mettre dans le corps la
fatigue, l’attente, c’est ca le corps qu’incorpore le temps.
—Gilles Deleuze, Paris VIII Seminar,
November 20, 1984
Many connoisseurs of the debates surrounding the lives and the
deaths of the (neostructuralist!) subject have complained that the
underdetermined or even indeterminate (not to be confused with
9
TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION
“undecidable”)** content of the notion “subjectivity” often leaves
the debate without a point. The jury is still out, trying to nail down
the precise moment of the subject’s ingress in the “neostructuralist”
body, and voices are raised for the reprieve of the praxiological sub-
ject or for the memorial repetition of the post-Messianic subject
which is ‘‘never yet p.’27 But was it ever clear that the
“neostructuralists”>* had so unceremoniously ousted the subject from
their discourse?
Strengthening the conviction that the ejection did occur is the
posting, by friends and foes alike, of a composite picture of the
neostructuralists which is everyone’s and no one’s. The montage
which makes this composite picture possible verifies Bishop Berke-
ley’s suspicion that behind every abstract generality one can always
find the sharp outline of the features of one of the many family
members. But then the problem with composite pictures is that they
offer, on demand, some pretty convenient alibis: with their help, an
exemplaristic hermeneutics is brought to bear on a single family
member, alleging at the same time that any other member of the
family could have been an equally good choice; and while this is
said, the artist is assured of a quick exit if his bluff is called. A
composite picture, after all, must blur—if not obliterate—individual
differences. I am not suggesting, of course, that there is something
inherently vile in composite pictures; on the contrary, I am leading
toward the suggestion that we must take them much more seriously
than we have done. There is, after all, a neostructuralist doxa, pre-
supposed and entailed by the labors of the neostructuralists we read.
But this doxa is fissured and cracked; it envelops lines of flight and
plateaus of (invented) compossibilities; and it brings together col-
liding forces along with the unstable consensus of a concordia discor-
data. Taking this doxa seriously presupposes a montage which op-
erates on sharp-focused and skillfully developed singular frames.
Lenses, made to adjust quickly between high and low altitudes, seem
to be indispensable for carrying out this task.
It will be foolish, of course, to deny that the death of a certain
subject has really been wished for, and that it has, perhaps, really
happened. Rumor has it that the death has been wished for in the
wake of a certain deadly violence perpetrated against the Other.”
In this case, the resurrection of another Self and of an (otherwise)
Other had understandably to wait for the completion of the critique
10
«
TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION
of the Cartesian, Kantian, and Husserlian subject, and for the un-
masking of the fraudulent accreditation that this subject had received
in classical and modern texts. All this is well known; but what the
composite picture of the neostructuralists renders invisible is the fact
that not everyone who wished the death of “the” subject and the
advent of a new entity in its place did share the same motivation for
the wish or the same vision for the new dawn.
Deleuze undoubtedly is among those who contributed decisively
to the critical unmasking of old pretensions and to the hopeful in-
vigilation for the arrival of the new. An important “theory of sub-
jectivity” runs through his entire work, beginning with the essay
on Hume and reaching impressive depth and precision with his essay
on Leibniz. What is remarkable, first of all, about this contribution
to a theory of subjectivity is that it combines a radical critique of
interiority with a stubborn search for “an inside that lies deeper than
any internal world.”*° In this sense, the search for the fold—‘“the
inside as the operation of the outside”’*’—that Deleuze so gallantly
attributed to Foucault, is as much his own life-long search as it was
(for’a more limited time span) his friend’s.
There is no doubt that Deleuze’s theory is marked by the tension
created by a radical critique of interiority and a simultaneous quest
for an inside deeper than any internal world. But, as Manfred Frank
(much more convincing in his studies of modern subjectivity than
in his parody of neostructuralism) has shown, this tension is una-
voidable in all theories of subjectivity mindful of the bankruptcy of
models based on the classical optical metaphor, the egological field,
and more generally every relational account of the structure con-
sciousness/self-consciousness.*? It is not strange, therefore, that De-
leuze’s contribution to the theory of subjectivity, mindful as it is of
the opening up of a new space for a new Subject, after the bankruptcy
of the old, experiences the same tension.
But whatever the advantages or the shortcomings of Deleuze’s
contribution may be, this contribution cannot be assessed fairly so
long as the wrong strategies for reading Deleuze persist and con-
tribute to the clouding of the issues. Deleuze’s own rhizomatic
growth and his strategy of writing should have warned against hom-
ocentric evolutionist readings. In fact, any example of his writing
on subjectivity taken from his texts would have sufficed to show that
no reading of this kind had a chance to succeed. Consider, for ex-
TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION
ample, the following three passages: (1) “The subject is defined
by the movement through which it is developed.” Believing and
inventing is what makes the subject to be subject (Empiricism and
Subjectivity [1953]);* (2) “There are no more subjects but dynamic
individuation without subjects, which constitute collective assem-
blages. ... Nothing becomes subjective but hecceities take shape
according to the compositions of non-subjective powers and effects”
(Dialogues [1977]);“* (3) “The struggle for [modern] subjectivity pre-
sents itself, therefore, as the right to difference, variation and met-
amorphosis” (Foucault [1986]).*° How are these three statements to
be shown compossible through the application of homocentric and
evolutionist reading strategies?
It may seem, for a while, more promising to try and tease out of
Deleuze’s texts a theory of subjectivity after we adjust our interpre-
tive lenses to the sort of periodization that a certain (questionable)
reception of the “final Foucault” made fashionable. An arc would
then run through Deleuze’s writings, leading from an early histo-
rico-philosophical interest in the structure-Subject and its actuali-
zation (essay on Hume), through a middle period marked by the
arrogant and suicidal pulverization of subjectivity (May 1968? Fe-
lix?), to a belated, timid retrieval of the Subject as folded interiority
(Foucault, Le Pli).
The trouble with this periodization, however, is that it is too
facile. It overlooks, once again, the rhizome named “Deleuze” and
bypasses the complex relationships that exist between Deleuzian
texts. The Logic of Sense (1969), for example, orchestrates the dis-
cussions on subjectivity around essays published and composed long
before the chronological punctum of the explosion of desires. It
cannot be read as a neostructuralist manifesto celebrating the pul-
verization of the Subject; it is too sober for that. Yet, this book
anticipates and prepares Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972, 1980),
clearing up a transcendental field inhabited by singularities, events,
or intensities and striated with lines converging for the creation of
worlds, or with series of worlds diverging and resonant. A radical
displacement of phenomenology is undoubtedly at work in this text,
culminating in the “greening” of the philosophy of difference. But,
on the other hand, this new focus does not prevent the series of The
Logic of Sense from being consistent with the theses on subjectivity,
already posted in the essay on Hume’s theory of human nature. The
TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION
structure of the Subject (belief and anticipation) and also the variable
strategies for its actualization inside changing circumstances are
themes common to them both. It would be fair to say that The Logic
of Sense approaches the Je et les dessous du Je** in an entirely novel and
fascinating way: its singularities and its converging or diverging lines
are now full-fledgéd intensities, struggling to avoid thermic death
in the course of being stretched and extended. But then again in-
tensity does not make its appearance for the first time here: only a
careless reading of Deleuze’s earlier texts on Hume, on Nietzsche,
and on Bergson can sidestep the theory of intensive time, already
developed and pivotal in them.‘
The only way, I think, to assess correctly Deleuze’s contributions
toward a theory of subjectivity is to read him the way he reads others:
we must read him according to the series he creates, observing their
ways of converging and of becoming compossible, or—and this
amounts to the same thing for our strategy of reading—according
to the series on their way to diverging and beginning to resonate.
A relentless vigilance is necessary in every step of such a reading. It
will be a mistake, for example, to take each book of Deleuze for
one series, and to try to establish compossibility or resonance among
the various books. I do not doubt that the names of those that De-
leuze reads and writes about stand for singular points (intensities),
capable of generating series. In this sense, one could, with justifi-
cation, speak of a Hume-series, a Bergson-series, a Leibniz-series,
etc. But none of these series is coextensive with the text or texts
that bear the name of the thinker after whom a series has been named.
Books and series do not coincide. This is why it would be better to
talk about the ‘““Hume-effect”’ series, the ““Leibniz-effect”’ series, etc.
At any rate provided that we take adequate precautions, there is
no harm in trying to spread Deleuze’s contributions to a theory of
subjectivity along the following series, each one of which could be
identified by means of the question/problem introducing it. The
Hume-series (how does the mind become a subject?); the Bergson-series
(how can a static ontological genesis of the subject be worked out
beginning with prepersonal and preindividual singularities and
events?); the Leibniz-series (how can there be a notion of individuality
which is neither a mere deduction from the concept “‘Subject”—in
which case it would be contradictory—nor a mere figure of an in-
dividuality deprived of concept—in which case it would be absurd
TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION
and ineffable?); the Nietzsche-Foucault-series (now can a dynamic gen-
esis of subjectivity be constructed, in which the subject would be
the folding and internalization of Outside forces, without suc-
cumbing to a philosophy of interiority?); the Nietzsche-Klossowski-
series (how is it possible to think the subject in terms of inclusive
disjunctions and simultaneously affirmed incompossible worlds?).
These series would have run along their own lines of flight, without
permitting the construction of any planes of consistency among
them, were it not for Deleuze’s concepts “‘chaosmos” = chaos +
cosmos and “cracked I” (Je félé), which in their capacity as port-
manteau words circulate through the series and make possible the
inclusive, disjunctive affirmation of all series. It is chaosmos, that is
to say, the becoming-world, that posits the constitution of the subject
as a task, and chaosmos again that guarantees that the constituted
subject will not emerge as a substantive hypokeimenon, but rather as
an already always “cracked I.”
It is indeed striking to find the germs of all these series present
in an early work like Empiricism and Subjectivity. Empiricism and Sub-
jectivity is, for the most part, a segment of the Hume-series, without
this fact preventing it from being also crisscrossed by segments of
other series. It speaks of the structure—Subject in terms of antici-
pation and invention; it also introduces the actualization of the Sub-
ject in terms of concrete and always changing circumstances. It is
coordinated by the question “how does the mind become subject?’
and weaves the structure of subjectivity in terms of belief, antici-
pation and inventiveness. The Subject, in this series, is possible only
as the correlate of the fictional idea “World.” The constitutive func-
tion of the latter seals and makes possible the constitutive function
of the principles of human nature. a
Subjects anticipate and invent; in fact, they anticipate because they
invent, and they invent always in concrete circumstances. The an-
ticipatory and inventive subject will dot Deleuze’s writings, without
exception, although later, anticipation will be called by other names
(‘‘repetition,” “absolute memory”), and invention will acquire its
own synonyms (‘“assembling,” “becoming on a line of flight,” : be-
coming-other,” etc.).** Deleuze will never waver in his conviction
that only empiricists have the right access to the problem of sub-
jectivity. Nonempiricists always endow their transcendental fields
with individuality and personality, that is, with subjective Selfhood
TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION
and personal Otherness, replicating thereby the empirical domain
at the very moment that they allege to be in the process of grounding
it. Empiricists, on the contrary, begin with the mind as a theater
without a stage; they begin with the mind as delirium, contingency,
and indifference and strive to understand how a mere collection of
images can ever become a system. How can the mind become a
subject? How can it become human nature? Deleuze-Hume’s answer
is that the mind becomes subject, that is, an entity capable of be-
lieving, anticipating, and inventing, as the result of the combined
effects upon it of the principles of human nature. These principles,
whether as principles of association or as principles of passion, pursue
a selective and a corrective course: they select impressions of sen-
sation, designate them as candidates for association, and, on this basis,
they constitute impressions of reflection. In the case of cognition,
the principles of association—contiguity, resemblance, and causal-
ity—designate impressions and organize the given into a system,
bringing thereby constancy to the mind and naturalizing it. They
form habit, they establish belief, and they constitute the subject as
an entity that anticipates.
On the other hand, Deleuze recognizes that the constitution of
the ethical subject presents Hume with a different problem: although
the building blocks of morality are naturally given, they tend none-
theless to exclude one another. The mind experiences sympathy
naturally. But our sympathies are partial, limited, and narrowly fo-
cused; if violence is to be avoided, the extension of our sympathies
requires corrective integration.*? Only through integration can the
ethical totality be brought about, as an invention and an artifice.
General rules, both extensive and corrective, must be invented and
allowed to guide the operations of the principles of passion, for the
sake of the integration of sympathies and for the constitution of the
ethical subject.
For Deleuze-Hume, therefore, subjects affirm more than they
know, and transcend their partiality in their moral acts; they believe,
as this allows them to infer one (nongiven) part of nature from
another which is already given; and they constitute ethical totalities
by inventing institutions which nature does not provide. In both
cases (knowledge and ethics), the subject transcends the given, albeit
not in the same manner-at least not initially. Transcendence, in the
case of knowledge, implies extending the Same or the Similar over
TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION
parts which are external to one another, whereas transcendence, in
the case of ethics, involves the intensity of the integrative act. The
famous pair of categories, extension-intensity, around which the en-
tire Deleuzian theory of difference and repetition will be orches-
trated, has therefore found in the Humean empiricism an important
ally and a vital inspiration: neither one will ever be abandoned.
But, as we now know from Deleuze’s later work, the relations
between the extension of contemplation and the intensity of practice
are not as unproblematic and unidimensional as my last paragraph
seems to suggest. Intensity and extension as world-making forces
are not opposite poles in a field of exclusive disjunctions. An antic-
ipation of their complex relationship in an early work such as Em-
piricism and Subjectivity is, in fact, striking. It centers on Deleuze’s
discussion of Humean time and on the function that time has in the
constitution of subjectivity. Time was initially introduced by Hume
as the structure of the mind; but the subject, formed by the habit
inside the mind, is the synthesis of time. The mind was succession;
the subject is now durée and anticipation. The anticipating and in-
venting subject constitutes the past which weighs on the present,
making it pass, while positing the past as the rule for the future.
Time as the constitutive force of subjectivity, responsible for the
bending and folding of the given and the formation of interiority,
is indeed intensive.
The same braiding of intensity and extension is discovered by
Deleuze in the complex relations that Hume assigns to the principles
of association and passion: passions require the association of ideas,
but on the other hand the association of ideas presupposes passions.°°
The understanding reflects on our interest and socializes passion; but
passions also give a disposition, an inclination, and a direction to the
association. Ultimately, though, the relations between epistemic as-
sociation and inclining passion are weighted in favor of the intensity
of the passion, since there would be no association of ideas without
the tendency-creating passions. Associations without passions are
blind, but then passions without associations would be empty. The
weight of this Humean move is not lost on Deleuze: it explains why
no theory of subjectivity can be successful if it relies on the cognitive
subject only. The problem can be correctly raised only at the level
of practice, and the issues surrounding subjectivity cannot be dis-
sociated from the imperatives of experimentation and struggle.
16
'
i
TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION
Moreover, the primacy of practice in the correct articulation of
the structure-subjectivity resurfaces during Deleuze-Hume’s discus-
sion of the actualization of this structure in concrete subjects. The
principles of association alone cannot account for the difference be-
tween subjects. Only concrete circumstances can explain the facts
of differentiation. A differential psychology, as the science of the
particular, must therefore reveal these circumstances. Deleuze will
then reiterate Hume’s position which asserts that subjectivity ac-
quires its form through the principles of association while it is in-
dividuated through the principles of passion. Affectivity activates a
tendency of the subject making her want to identify with the effects
of her actions in all cases where these effects are the result of the
means chosen. Once again, therefore, subjectivity is essentially
linked with practice, for only a mind endowed with ends, and re-
lations corresponding to these ends, can be a subject. Associationism
is the theory of all that is practical, and operates only when harmony
between fiction and the principles of passion has been established.
It should be obvious, despite the Humean tenor of the discussion,
that the stakes are in fact about the practical and speculative interests
of human subjects. The intensive, integrative act of the practical
interest and its priority over the cognitive-speculative interest make
possible the organization of subjectivity. But the peculiarity of the
Hume-series is that it posits the subject as an always already ‘cracked
subject.” To disclose the cracks in the structure, Deleuze-Hume must
direct his attention to the indispensable role that fiction plays in the
structuration of the subject and to the constitution of individuality.
The subject, as we have seen, is the product of the principles of
human nature; but then the mind, or the given, is the product of
the powers of nature. Under these terms, the combined labor of
passioned intensity and of the extensive use of associative principles
would be spent in vain, as long as no firm relation has been estab-
lished between the principles of human nature and the principles of
nature.
Deleuze, therefore, in one of the most ingenious and most con-
troversial gestures of the entire Hume-series, turns to Hume’s dis-
cussions of religion, and fastens his analysis on the retrieval of pur-
posiveness (finalité), made possible by these discussions, and its
reentry into the world. Hume concedes that principles of association
“and passion (in both their extensive and their corrective function),
TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION
jointly operate in the realm of religion. Deleuze then argues that,
despite contrary textual appearances, Hume’s corrective rules do not
refute religion. On the contrary, theism is justified as soon as a certain
antinomy affecting our ways of thinking about the world is resolved.
On one hand, Hume is clear that the world is not an object; objects
are in the world. It follows that the world cannot function in an
argument, or be made to stand for an effect in a causal narrative,
which would sing the glory of God’s causal authorship. This stricture
allows Hume to criticize teleological arguments and their God-
founding pretensions. But there is something more in Hume, and
Deleuze is not letting it go unnoticed. The world is always, for
Hume, a fiction of the imagination; “but with the world, fiction
becomes a horizon of experience, a principle of human nature which
must co-exist with the other principles, despite the contradictions.”51
The world abides as a fiction of the imagination, and also fiction
becomes a principle of human nature; the world never turns into an
object of the understanding. It remains as an idea, but the idea is
not constitutive; it constitutes a fiction.
Hume’s empiricism, then, in Deleuze’s estimate, shows the subject
in the process of being constituted on a soil already eroded by a
contradiction without possible conciliation. In the antinomy of the
world, the imagination with its fiction is opposed to the principles
which fix it and the operations which correct it. Under these cir-
cumstances, extension and reflection find themselves on a collision
course: an opposition reigns supreme between the principles of as-
sociation and the fiction which has become a principle of nature.
No choice is possible between the understanding and the suggestions
of the imagination: for “when fiction becomes principle, reflection
does not stop reflecting, nonetheless it can no longer correct.”’®? All
the systematization, naturalization, and subjectivation of the mind
that we witnessed so far have not helped the mind silence its
delirium.
Yet it is the same delirium that makes possible the solution of
the antinomy of the world. Hume, according to Deleuze, prohibits
the mobilization of the principles of human nature for the sake of
proving that the world is God’s effect; the same Hume, though, is
not opposed to thinking of God negatively, as the cause of these
principles. This decision, concludes Deleuze, reestablishes purpo-
siveness to the extent that it makes the agreement between the prin-
TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION
ciples of human nature and the hidden powers of nature thinkable
again.*? A long quotation from Deleuze’s chapter on Hume in La
Philosophie forcefully makes this point: it characterizes the stages by
means of which the real world becomes a fiction before the oppo-
sition of reality and fiction is overcome.
In opposition to ancient scepticism which rests on the var-
iability of sensible appearance and on the errors of the senses,
modern scepticism rests on the status of relations and on
their exteriority. The first act of modern scepticism was the
discovery of belief in the foundations of knowledge, that is,
the naturalization of belief (positivism). Starting from this
point, its second act was the denunciation of illegitimate
beliefs, that is, of beliefs which do not obey the rules which
result in effective knowledge (probabilism, calculus of prob-
abilities). However, in a last refinement and in a third act,
the illegitimate beliefs in the World, the Self and God appear as
the horizon of all possible legitimate beliefs, or as the lowest degree
of belief.5* [The italics are mine.]
Incipit simulacrum!
19
ONE
THE PROBLEM OF
KNOWLEDGE
AND THE PROBLEM
OF ETHICS
HuME PROPOSES THE creation of a science of humanity, but what is
really his fundamental project? A choice is always defined in terms
of what it excludes, and a historical project is a logical substitution.
Hume’s project entails the substitution of a psychology of the mind by
a psychology of the mind’s affections. The constitution of a psychology
of the mind is not at all possible, since this psychology cannot find
in its object the required constancy or universality; only a psychology
of affections will be capable of constituting the true science of
humanity.
In this sense, Hume is a moralist and a sociologist, before being
a psychologist; the Treatise shows that the two forms under which
the mind is affected are essentially the passional and the social. They
imply each other, assuring thereby the unity of the object of an
authentic science. On one hand, society demands and expects from
each one of its members the display of constant reactions, the pres-
ence of passions able to provide motives and ends, and the availability
of collective or individual characters: “A prince, who imposes a tax
upon his subjects, expects their compliance.”! On the other hand,
the passions implicate society as the oblique means for their satis-
faction.” In the last analysis, the coherence of the passional and the
‘social, in history, is revealed as an internal unity, with political
21
THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE AND OF ETHICS
organization and the institutions giving history its objects. History
studies the relations between motive and action in most circumstan-
ces, and it also exhibits the uniformity of the human passions. In
brief, the option of the psychologist may be expressed paradoxically
as follows: one must be a moralist, sociologist, or historian before
being a psychologist, in order to be a psychologist. Here, the project
of the human sciences reaches the condition which would make
knowledge in general possible: the mind must be affected. By itself
and in itself, the mind is not nature; it is not the object of science.
Hence, the question which will preoccupy Hume is this: how does
the mind become human nature?
Passional and social affection are only a part of human nature;
there are also the understanding and the association of ideas. The
fact is, though, that this list is still based on convention. The real
role of the understanding, says Hume, is to make the passions sociable
and the interest social. The understanding reflects interest. On the
other hand, nothing prevents us from thinking of it as something
distinct, the way the physicist fragments a movement, while rec-
ognizing all along that it is indivisible and noncomposite.? We should
not, in fact, forget that two points of view coexist in Hume: the
passions and the understanding present themselves, in a way which
must be made clear, as two distinct parts. By itself, though, the
understanding is only the process of the passions on their way to
socialization. Sometimes we see that the understanding and the pas-
sions constitute two separate problems, but at other times, we see
that the understanding is subordinated to the passions. This is the
reason why, even when studied separately, the understanding must
above all help us to understand better the general sense of the above
question.
Hume constantly affirms the identity between the mind, the imag-
ination, and ideas. The mind is not nature, nor does it have a nature.
It is identical with the ideas in the mind. Ideas are given, as given;
they are experience. The mind, on the other hand, is given as a
collection of ideas and not as a system. It follows that our earlier
question can be expressed as follows: how does a collection become
a system? The collection of ideas is called “imagination,” insofar as
the collection designates not a faculty but rather an assemblage of
things, in the most vague sense of the term: things are as they
2.2
THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE AND OF ETHICS
appear—a collection without an album, a play without a stage, a flux
of perceptions. “The comparison of the theatre must not mislead us;
nor have we the most distant notion of the place, where these scenes
are represented, or of the materials, of which it is compos’d.’’* The
place is not different from what takes place in it; the representation
does not take place in a subject. Then again the question may be:
how does the mind become a subject? How does the imagination become
a faculty?
It is true, Hume constantly reiterates, that ideas are in the imag-
ination. But the preposition here does not signify inherence in a
subject; rather, the use of the preposition is metaphorical, and it
means to exclude from the mind an activity which would be distinct
from the movement of ideas; it means to ensure the identity between
the mind and the ideas in the mind. The preposition signifies that
the imagination is not a factor, an agent, or a determining deter-
mination. It is a place which must be localized, that is to say, fixed—
something determinable. Nothing is done by the imagination; every-
thing is done in the imagination. It is not even a faculty for forming
ideas, because the production of an idea by the imagination is only
the reproduction of an impression in the imagination. Certainly, the
imagination has its own activity; but even this activity, being whims-
ical and delirious, is without constancy and without uniformity. It
is the movement of ideas, and the totality of their actions and re-
actions. Being the place of ideas, the fancy is the collection of sep-
arate, individual items. Being the bond of ideas, it moves through
the universe,® engendering fire dragons, winged horses, and mon-
strous giants.° The depth of the mind is indeed delirium, or—same
thing from another point of view—change and indifference.” By
itself, the imagination is not nature; it is a mere fancy. There is no
constancy or uniformity in the ideas that I have. No more is there
constancy or uniformity in the way in which ideas are connected through
the imagination: only chance makes up this connection.? The gen-
erality of the idea is not a characteristic of the idea; it does not belong
to the imagination: rather than being the nature of some idea, it is
a role which every idea can play under the influence of other
principles.
What are these other principles? How does the imagination be-
come human nature? Constancy and uniformity are present only in
the way in which ideas are associated in the imagination. Association,
23
THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE AND OF ETHICS
with its three principles (contiguity, resemblance, and causality),
transcends the imagination, and also differs from it. Association af-
fects the imagination. Rather than finding its origin, association finds
in the imagination its term and its object. It is a quality which unifies
ideas, not a quality of ideas themselves.?
As we will see, through belief and causality the subject transcends
the given. Literally, the subject goes beyond what the mind gives
it: I believe in what I have neither seen nor touched. But the subject
can go beyond the given because first of all it is, inside the mind, the
effect of principles transcending and affecting the mind. Before there
can be belief, all three principles of association must organize the
given into a system, imposing constancy on the imagination. The
latter does not draw its own resources from constancy, but without
it, it would never be a human nature. These principles attribute to
ideas the links and principles of union, which, instead of being the
characteristics of ideas, are the original qualities of human nature.’°
The privilege that causality enjoys is that it alone can make us affrm
existence and make us believe. It confers upon the idea of the object
a solidity and an objectivity that this idea would not have had it only
been associated through contiguity or resemblance to an actual
impression.'! But the other two principles also share with causality
a common role: they fix and naturalize the mind; they prepare belief
and accompany it. We can now see the special ground of empiricism:
nothing in the mind transcends human nature, because it is human
nature that, in its principles, transcends the mind; nothing is ever
transcendental. Association, far from being a product, is a rule of the
imagination and a manifestation of its free exercise. It guides the
imagination, gives it uniformity, and also constrains it.!? In this sense,
ideas are connected in the mind—not by the mind.!® The imagination
is indeed human nature but only to the extent that other principles
have made it constant and settled.
There is a difficulty, though, even with this definition. Why is
regulated imagination, rather than the rule grasped in its active
power, human nature? How can we say of the imagination that it
becomes a nature, despite the fact that it has not within itself a reason
for this becoming? The answer is simple. Essentially, principles refer
to the mind which they affect, but nature refers to the imagination;
its entire function is to qualify the imagination. Association is a law
of nature, and like every other law, it is defined by its effects, not
24
THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE AND OF ETHICS
by a cause. Similarly, on an entirely different plane, God may be
called “‘cause”’ and preestablished harmony or teleology may be fruit-
fully invoked.** The conclusion of the Dialogues, the essay on mir-
acles, and the essay on immortality are in fact coherent. A cause may
always be thought, as something in itself, transcending all the anal-
ogies which provide it with a determined content, in the case of
experience and knowledge.'> But the fact is that philosophy, being
a human science, need not search for the cause; it should rather
scrutinize effects. The cause cannot be known; principles have neither
cause nor an origin of their power. What is original is their effect
upon the imagination.
The effect of association appears in three ways.1* Sometimes the
idea takes on a role and becomes capable of representing all these
ideas with which, through resemblance, it is associated (general idea);
at other times, the union of ideas brought about by the mind acquires
a regularity not previously had, in which case “nature in a manner
point(s] out to every one those simple ideas, which are most proper
to be united into a complex one’”!” (substance and mode); finally,
sometimes, one idea can introduce another’ (relation). The result
of the association in all three cases is the mind’s easy passage from
one idea to another, so that the essence of relations becomes precisely
this easy transition.'!? The mind, having become nature, has acquired
now a tendency.
But despite the fact that nature makes reference to ideas, to the
extent that it associates them in the mind, the ideas do not acquire
a new quality of their own, nor are they capable of attributing it to
their objects; no new ideas ever appear. Ideas are related in a uniform
way, but those relations are not the object of an idea. Hume, in fact,
observes that general ideas must be represented, but only in the fancy,
under the form of a particular idea having a determined quantity
and quality.2° On one hand, the imagination cannot become in itself
nature without being for itself the fancy. As for the fancy, it finds
here an entirely new extension. The fancy can always invoke rela-
tions, borrow the clothing of nature, and form general rules, going
beyond the determined field of legitimate knowledge and carrying
knowledge beyond its proper limits. It can display its own fancies:
the Irish cannot be witty, the French cannot have solidity.2! In order
to wipe out the effect of these extensive rules and in order to con-
solidate knowledge, we will need the application of different rules—
THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE AND OF ETHICS
this time, the application of corrective rules. Albeit less fancifully,
the imagination, whenever faced with a relation, will not fail to
double and reinforce it by means of other relations, however un-
merited they may be.”
On the other hand, the mind cannot be activated by the principles
of nature without remaining passive. It only suffers the effects. Re-
lations are not doing the connecting, but rather they themselves are
connected; causality, for example, is passion, an impression of re-
flection,23 and a “resemblance effect.” Causality is felt. It is a
perception of the mind and not a conclusion of the understanding:
“We must not here be content with saying, that the idea of cause
and effect arises from objects constantly united; but must afhrm that
tis the very same with the idea of these objects.” In short, the
necessary relation is indeed in the subject, but only insofar as the subject
contemplates.2’ This is the reason why Hume sometimes, on the neg-
ative side, insists on the paradox of his thesis; and at other times, on
the positive side, he emphasizes its orthodoxy. Insofar as necessity
is on the side of the subject, the necessary relation, in the case of
things, is only a constant conjunction—necessity is indeed only that.®
But necessity belongs to the subject only insofar as the subject con-
templates, and not insofar as it acts.” The constant conjunction is
the entire necessary relation.2° For Hume, the determination is not
determining; it is rather determined. When Hume speaks of an act
of the mind—of a disposition—he does not mean to say that the mind
is active but that it is activated and that it has become subject. The
coherent paradox of Hume’s philosophy is that it offers a subjectivity
which transcends itself, without being any less passive. Subjectivity
is determined as an effect; it is in fact an impression of reflection. The
mind, having been affected by the principles, turns now into a
subject.
Nature cannot be studied scientifically except in terms of its effects
upon the mind, yet the only true science of the mind should have
nature as its object. “Human Nature is the only science of man.””?!
This, of course, means that the psychology of affections disallows
any psychology of the mind, but it also means that affections give
the mind its qualities. A certain ambiguity may well be explained
in this way. In Hume’s work, we witness the unequal development
of two lines of diverse inspiration. On one hand, the psychology of
the mind is a psychology of ideas, of simple elements, of minima
ot indivisibles. It occupies essentially the second part of the system
26
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H
i
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THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE AND OF ETHICS
of the understanding—“the ideas of space and time.” This is Hume’s
atomism. On the other hand, the psychology of human nature is a
psychology of dispositions, perhaps even an anthropology, a science
of practice, especially morality, politics, and history. It is finally a
real critique of psychology, insofar as it locates the reality of its
object in all the determinations not given in an idea, or in all the
qualities transcending the mind. This second line of inspiration con-
stitutes Hume’s associationism, and to confuse associationism with
atomism is a curious misunderstanding.
Now, we are faced with the question: why does the first inspi-
ration subsist in Hume’s writings, especially in his theory of space?
We have seen that, although the psychology of affections contains
in its project the critique and even the elimination of a psychology
of the mind (as a science impossible to constitute), it nevertheless
contains in its object an essential reference to the mind as the ob-
jective of natural qualifications. Since the mind is in itself'a collection
of atoms, a true psychology is neither immediately nor directly pos-
sible: the principles do not make the mind an object of possible
science without first giving it an objective nature. Hume therefore
does not create an atomistic psychology; he rather indicates, inside
atomism, a state of the mind which does not permit any psychology.
We cannot reproach Hume for having neglected the important prob-
lem of the conditions of the human sciences. We might even wonder
whether modern authors do not repeat Hume’s philosophical project
when they associate an assiduous critique of atomism with every
positive moment of the human sciences. It would follow that they
treat atomism less as a historical localized thesis and more as the
general schema of what psychology cannot be; they condemn it,
therefore, in the name of the concrete rights of ethology and so-
ciology, or of the passional and the social.
“The intellect,” said Comte with respect to impossible psy-
chologies, “‘is almost exclusively the subject of their spec-
ulations, and the affections have been almost entirely ne-
glected; and, moreover, always subordinated to the
understanding. ... The whole of human nature is thus very
unfaithfully represented by these futile systems. . . .’
All scrious writers agree on the impossibility of a psychology of
the mind. ‘This is why they criticize so meticulously every single
27
THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE AND OF ETHICS
identification between consciousness and knowledge. They differ
only in the way they determine the factors which give a nature to
the mind. Sometimes, these factors are the body and matter, in which
case psychology makes room for physiology. Sometimes they are
particular principles, constituting a psychic equivalent of matter,
wherein psychology finds its unique, possible object and its scientific
condition. Hume, with his principles of association, has chosen the
latter route, which is the most difficult and the most audacious. This
is where his sympathy for materialism comes from, and at the same
time his reticence toward it.
Until now, we have shown only that the task that Hume’s philosophy
sets for itself is to answer the question “how does the mind become
a nature.” But why is it this one? The question must be taken up on
a different plane. Hume’s problem would then be exclusively about
a fact, and therefore empirical. Quid facti? What is the fact of knowl-
edge? It is transcendence or going beyond. I afirm more than I know;
my judgment goes beyond the idea. In other words, I am a subject.
I say “Caesar is dead,” “the sun will rise tomorrow,” “Rome exists”;
I speak in general terms and I have beliefs, I establish relations—this
is a fact and a practice. In the case of knowledge, where is the fact?
The fact is that these practices cannot be expressed in the form of an
idea without the idea becoming immediately contradictory. Take,
for example, the incompatibility between a general or abstract idea
and the nature of an idea,** or between a real relation between objects
and the objects to which we apply the relation.*4 The more im-
mediate or immediately decided the incompatibility is, the more
decisive it will be.** Hume does not reach this point after a long
discussion, he begins with it, so that the point about the contradiction
assumes naturally the role of a basic challenge. This is the only
relation between the philosopher and the others inside the system
of the understanding.** “Show me the idea you claim to have.”
What’s at stake in the challenge is the very psychology of mind. In
fact, the given and experience have now two inverse meanings. The
given is the idea as it is given in the mind, without anything tran-
scending it—not even the mind, which is therefore identical with
the idea. But, the transcendence itself is also given, in an altogether
different sense and manner—it is given as practice, as an affection of
the mind, and as an impression of reflection: passion, says Hlume,
28
THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE AND OF ETHICS
does not have to be defined:*” by the same token, belief is a je ne sais
quoi adequately felt by everyone.** Empirical subjectivity is consti-
tuted in the mind under the influence of principles affecting it; the
mind therefore does not have the characteristics of a preexisting
subject. True psychology, that is, the psychology of affections, will
be duplicated in each one of its moments by means of a critique of
the false psychology of the mind; the latter is in fact incapable of
grasping without contradiction the constitutive element of human
reality. But why is it finally necessary that philosophy undertake this
critique, express the transcendence in an idea, produce the contra-
diction, and manifest the incompatibility as the fact of knowledge?
It is because the transcendence under discussion is not given in
an idea, but is rather referred to the mind; it qualifies the mind. The
mind is at the same time the object of a critique and the term of a
necessary reference. The necessity of the critique is located here.
This is the reason why, with respect to questions of the understand-
ing, Hume’s method is always the same: it goes from the absence
of an idea in the mind to the presence of an affection of the mind.
The negation of the idea of a thing affirms the identity between the
character of this thing and the nature of an impression of reflection.
This is the case with existence, general ideas, necessary connection,
the self, and also vice and virtue. In all these cases, instead of negating
the criterion of the idea, we allow the negation of the idea itself to
serve as a criterion; transcendence is first and foremost understood
in its negative relation to that which it transcends.*? Conversely, in
the structures of transcendence, the mind finds a kind of positivity
which comes to it from outside.
But then, how can we reconcile this entire method with Hume’s
principle, according to which all ideas derive from a corresponding
impression and, consequently, every given impression is reproduced
in an idea which perfectly represents it? If, for example, necessity
is an impression of reflection, there must necessarily be an idea of
necessity.*° Critique, says Hume, does not deprive the idea of nec-
essary connection of its sense, it only destroys its improper appli-
cations.*? There certainly is an idea of necessity. But basically, we
speak of an impression of reflection, whenever the necessary relation
is the mind affected and determined (in certain circumstances) by
the idea of an object to form the idea of another object. The impres-
sion of necessity, because it is a qualification of the mind, would not
29
THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE AND OF ETHICS
be able to produce the idea as a quality of things. The proper role
of the impressions of reflection, being effects of the principles, is to
qualify in various ways the mind as subject. Affections then unveil
the idea of subjectivity. The term “idea” can no longer have the same
meaning. Consequently, the psychology of affections becomes the
philosophy of the constituted subject.
Rationalism has lost this philosophy. Hume’s philosophy is a
sharp critique of representation. It does not elaborate a critique of
relations but rather a critique of representations, precisely because
representations cannot present relations. By making representation
into a criterion and by placing ideas within reason, rationalism ex-
pects ideas to stand for something which cannot be constituted
within experience or be given in an idea without contradiction: the
generality of the idea, the existence of the object, and the content
of the terms “always,” “universal,” “necessary,” and “true.” Ra-
tionalism has transferred mental determinations to external objects,
taking away thereby from philosophy the meaning and the intelli-
gibility of practice and of the subject. The fact is, though, that the
mind is not reason; reason is an affection of the mind. In this sense,
reason will be called instinct,‘? habit, or nature. “[W]e have found
[reason] to be nothing but a general calm determination of the pas-
sions, founded on some distant view or reflexion.’4
Reason is a kind of feeling. Consequently, just as the method of
philosophy goes from the absence of an idea to the presence of an
impression, similarly the theory of reason moves also from a kind
of skepticism to a kind of positivism. It moves from a skepticism of
reason to a positivism of feeling, in which case the latter includes
reason as a reflection of feeling in the qualified mind.
In the same way that a distinction is made between atomism and
associationism, a distinction must also be made between the two
senses of the term “‘idea,’’ and therefore the two senses of the term
“impression.” In one sense, we do not have the idea of necessity,
but in another, we do. Despite the texts which present simultane-
ously and render homogeneous as much as possible* the impressions
of sensation and the impressions of reflection (or the ideas of sen-
sation and the ideas of reflection), the difference between the two
is really a difference of nature. Witness, for example, the following
quotation:
30
THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE AND OF ETHICS
For that is necessary to produce a new idea of reflection, nor
can the mind, by revolving over a thousand times all its ideas
of sensation, ever extract from them any new original idea,
unless nature has so fram’d its faculties, that it feels some new
original impression arise from such a contemplation.
The impressions of sensation are only the origin of the mind; as
for the impressions of reflection, they are the qualification of the
mind and the effect of principles in it. The point of view of the
origin, according to which every idea derives from a preexisting
impression and represents it, does not have the importance that peo-
ple attribute to it: it merely gives the mind a simple origin and frees
the ideas from the obligation of having to represent things, and also
from the corresponding difficulty of having to understand the re-
semblance of ideas. The real importance is on the side of the impres-
sions of reflection, because they are the ones which qualify the mind
as subject. The essence and the destiny of empiricism are not tied
to the atom but rather to the essence of association; therefore, em-
piricism does not raise the problem of the origin of the mind but
rather the problem of the constitution of the subject. Moreover, it
envisages this constitution in the mind as the effect of transcending
principles and not as the product of a genesis. The difficulty is in
establishing a specific relation between the two meanings of “idea”
or “impression,” or between origin and qualification. We have al-
ready seen their difference. It is the same difference that Hume
encounters under the form of an antimony of knowledge: it defines
the problem of the self. The mind is not subject; it is subjected.
When the subject is constituted in the mind under the effect of
principles, the mind apprehends itself as a self, for it has been qual-
ifted. But the problein is this: if the subject is constituted only inside
the collection of ideas, how can the collection of ideas be appre-
hended as a self, how can I say “I,” under the influence of those
same principles? We do not really understand how we can move
from dispositions to the self, or from the subject to the self. How
can the subject and the mind, in the last analysis, be one and the
same inside the self? The self must be both a collection of ideas and
a disposition, mind and subject. It is a synthesis, which is incom-
prehensible, since it ties together in its notion, without ever recon-
-ciling them, origin and qualification. ;
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THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE AND OF ETHICS
In short there are two principles, which I cannot render
consistent; nor is it in my powers to renounce either of them,
viz. that all our distinct perceptions are distinct existences, and
that the mind never perceives any real connexion among distinct
existences.*” :
Hume in fact adds that a solution may be possible. We will see later
on what sense we can give to this hope.
Human nature is the real object of science. But Hume’s philosophy
presents us with two modalities of this nature and with two types
of affection: we are faced, on one hand, with the effects of association,
and on the other with the effects of passion. Each one of them
determines a system: the system of understanding and the system of
passions and ethics. But what is their relation? To begin with, be-
tween the two, a kind of parallelism seems to be established and
followed exactly. Belief and sympathy correspond. Moreover, every-
thing that belongs to sympathy and goes beyond belief is, according
to the analysis, analogous to that which the passions add to the
association of ideas.4* On another plane, just as association fixes in
the mind a necessary generality, that is, a rule which is indispensable
to theoretical knowledge, in the same way the passions provide the
mind with the content of a constancy,*? make possible a practical
and moral activity, and give history its meaning. Without this double
movement, there would not even be a human nature, for the imag-
ination would be mere fancy. The points of correspondence do not
stop there: the relation between motive and action is of a piece with
causality,®° to the point that history must be construed as a physics
of humanity.*! Finally, in the case of the determination of nature,
and in the case of the constitution of a world of morality, general
rules, being both extensive and corrective, have the same sense. We
should not identify the system of understanding with theory, and
the system of morality and the passions with practice. Under the
name of belief, we have a practice of the understanding, and under
the form of social organization and justice, a theory of morality.
Moreover, everywhere in Hume, the only possible theory is a theory
of practice: with respect to the understanding, we have the calcu-
lation of probabilities and general rules; with respect to morality and
the passions, we have general rules and justice.
32
THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE AND OF ETHICS
Important as they may be, however, all these correspondences are
the mere presentation of philosophy and the distribution of its results.
The relation of analogy between the two constituted domains should
not make us forget which one of them determines the constitution
of the other as a philosophical matter. We actually seek the motive
of philosophy. At least, the fact is easy to decide: Hume is above all
a moralist, a political thinker, and a historian. But why?
The Treatise begins with the system of understanding, and raises
the problem of reason. However, the necessity of such a problem is
not obvious; it must have an origin, which we can consider as a
motive of this philosophy. It is not because reason solves problems
that it is itself a problem. On the contrary, for reason to experience
a problem, in its own domain, there must be a domain that escapes
reason, putting it initially into question. The important and principal
sentence of the Treatise is this: “ "Tis not contrary to Reason to prefer
the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.’’>?
Contrariety is an excessive relation. Reason can be put into ques-
tion and can raise the problem of its nature, because it does not apply
to all there is. The fact is that it does not determine practice: it is
practically or technically insufficient. Undoubtedly, reason influences
practice, to the extent that it informs us of the existence of a thing,
as the proper object of a passion, or to the extent that it reveals a
connection between causes and effects as means of satisfaction.®? But
we cannot say that reason produces an action, that passion contradicts
it, or even that reason thwarts a passion. Contradiction implies at
least a disagreement between ideas and the objects which the ideas
represent: “‘A passion is an original existence, or, if you will, mod-
ification of existence, and contains not any representative quality,
which renders it a copy of any other existence or modification.”
Moreover, moral distinctions do not let themselves be engendered
through reason; they arouse passions, and produce or hinder action.%
There is indeed contradiction in misappropriating properties and in
violating promises, but only to the extent that promises and prop-
erties exist in nature. Reason can always be brought to bear, but it
is brought to bear on a preexisting world and presupposes an an-
tecedent ethics and an order of ends.** Thus, it is because practice
and morality are in their nature (and not in their circumstances)
indifferent to reason that reason seeks its difference. Because it is
negated from the outside, it is denied from the inside and discovered
a3
THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE AND OF ETHICS
as madness and skepticism. Furthermore, because this skepticism has
its origin and its motive on the outside, in the indifference of practice,
practice itself is indifferent to skepticism: we can always play back-
gammon.*” The philosopher behaves as anyone else: the characteristic
of the skeptic is that her or his reasoning does not allow a reply and,
at the same time, does not produce conviction.** We are, therefore,
brought back to the previous conclusion, and this time we find it
completed: skepticism and positivism are mutually implied by the
same philosophical reasoning. The positivism of the passions and
ethics produces a skepticism of reason. This internalized skepticism,
having become a skepticism of reason, causes a positivism of the
understanding as the theory of a practice. This positivism of the
understanding is conceived in the image of the skepticism of reason.”
According to the image, yes, but not according to the resemblance.
We can now understand exactly the difference between the system
of ethics and the system of the understanding. In the case of the
affect, we must distinguish two terms: passional or moral affection,
and transcendence as a dimension of knowledge. Without a doubt,
the principles of morality, that is, the original and natural qualities
of the passions, transcend and affect the mind, just as the principles
of association do. The empirical subject is firmly constituted in the
mind by the combined effect of all principles. But it is only under
the (unequal) influence of the principles of association—not of the
others—that this subject can transcend the given: it believes. In this
precise sense, transcendence is exclusively the affair of knowledge:
it carries the idea beyond itself, giving it a role, affirming its object,
and constituting its links. It follows that in the system of the un-
derstanding, the most important principle which affects the mind
will first of all be studied in activity, that is, in the movement of a
subject that transcends the given: the nature of the causal relation
is grasped in the context of the inference. But the case of ethics is
completely different, even when it takes analogically the form of
the exposition of transcendence. There is no inference to be drawn
in this case. ‘““We do not infer a character to be virtuous, because it
pleases: But in feeling that it pleases after such a particular manner,
we in effect feel that it is virtuous.’’® Ethics admits the idea as a
factor only of the relevant circumstances and accepts the association
as a constituted element of human nature. In the system of the
understanding, on the other hand, association is a constitutive cle-
34
THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE AND OF ETHICS
ment—in fact, the only constitutive element of human nature. As an
illustration of this duality, it is enough to remember Hume’s dis-
tinction between two selves, and the different way in which he
presents and handles the corresponding problems.
Thus, there are two kinds of practice which are immediately
marked by very distinctive characteristics. The practice of the un-
derstanding determines the internal economy of nature, and proceeds
by means of extension. Nature, the object of physics, is partes extra
partes. This is its essence. If we consider objects from the point of
view of their idea, it is possible for all objects “to become causes or
effects of each other,’ since the causal relation is not one of their
qualities: from a logical point of view, anything could be the cause
of anything. But if, on the other hand, we observe the conjunction
of two objects, each of the numerically different cases which presents
the conjunction is independent of the other; neither has influence
over the other; “they are entirely divided by time and place.” They
are only the component parts of a certain probability. In fact, if
probability presupposes causality, the certainty which is born of
causal reasoning is also a limit and a particular case of probability,
or rather the practically absolute convergence of probabilities.” Na-
ture is indeed an extensive magnitude, and as such it lends itself to
physical experiment and measurement. The essential thing is to de-
termine the parts, and, within the realm of knowledge, this is the
function of general rules. Nature is not a whole; the whole can no
more be discovered than it can be invented. Totality is just a collec-
tion. “. .. Tanswer that the uniting of these parts into a whole, ...
is performed merely by an arbitrary act of the mind, and has no
influence on the nature of things.”’®* The general rules of knowledge,
insofar as their generality concerns the whole, are not different from
the natural principles of our understanding.” The difficulty, says
Hume, is not in inventing but rather in applying them.
The case of the practice of morality, however, is different. Here,
the parts are given immediately, without any inference required, and
without any necessary application. But, instead of being extensive, these
parts are mutually exclusive; they are not made up of parts (partielles),
as in the case of nature; they are rather partial (partiales). In the
ethical practice, the difficulty is in diverting and slanting that par-
tiality. The important thing here is to invent: justice is an artificial
virtue, and ‘“‘man is an inventive species.”’”° The essential task is to
35
THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE AND OF ETHICS
constitute a whole of morality; for justice is a schema,’! and the
schema is the very principle of society. “[A] single act of justice,
consider’d in itself, may often be contrary to the public good; and
’tis only the concurrence of mankind, in a general scheme or system
of action, which is advantageous.”””
The question is no longer about transcendence but rather about
integration. Unlike reason, which always proceeds from one part to
another, feeling reacts to wholes.”> This is why, in the domain of
ethics, general rules have a different meaning.
36
I
TWO
CULTURAL WORLD
AND GENERAL RULES
WE must Now explain some issues pertaining to ethics. It is the
essence of moral conscience to approve and disapprove. The feeling
which prompts us to praise or blame, the pain and pleasure which
determine vice and virtue, have an original nature: they are produced
with reference to character in general, and with no reference to our
particular interest.! But what can make us abandon the reference to
our own point of view, and make us refer, “through mere inspec-
tion,” to character in general? In other words, what can make us
take hold of something and live in it, because it is useful or agreeable
to the Other or to persons in general? Hume’s response is simple:
sympathy. There is, however, a paradox of sympathy: it opens up
for us a moral space and generality, but the space has no extension,
nor does the generality have quantity. In fact, in order to be moral,
sympathy must extend into the future and must not be limited to
the present moment. It must be a double sympathy, that is, a cor-
respondence of impressions multiplied by the desire for the pleasure
of the Other and by an aversion for her or his pain.? It is a fact that
sympathy exists and that it is extended naturally. But this extension
is not affirmed without exclusion: it is impossible for sympathy to
extend “without being aided by some circumstance in the present,
which strikes upon us in a lively manner,’”? excluding thereby all
i
47
CULTURAL WORLD AND GENERAL RULES
cases which do not present these circumstances. The circumstances,
from the point of view of the fancy, will be the degree or more
precisely the enormity of unhappiness;* but from the point of view
of human nature, there will be contiguity, resemblance, or causality.
Those whom we love, according to circumstances, are those close
to us, our peers and our relatives.> Briefly, our natural generosity is
limited; what is natural to us is a limited generosity.6 Sympathy
extends itself naturally into the future, but only when the circum-
stances limit its extension. The other side of generality to which
sympathy invites us is partiality, that is, an “inequality of affection”
that sympathy bestows upon us as a characteristic of our nature, “‘so
as to make us regard any remarkable transgression of such a degree
of partiality, either by too great an enlargement, or contraction of
the affections, as vicious and immoral.”’ We condemn the parents
who prefer strangers to their own children.
Thus, it is not our nature which is moral, it is rather our morality
which is in our nature. One of Hume’s simplest but most important
ideas is this: human beings are much less egoistic than they are partial.
Some believe themselves to be philosophers and good thinkers, as
they maintain that egoism is the last resort of every activity, but this
is too simple. Do they not see that “there are few that do not bestow
the largest part of their fortunes on the pleasures of their wives, and
the education of their children, reserving the smallest portion for
their own proper use and entertainment|?]’*
The truth is that an individual always belongs to a clan or a
community. Before being the types of community that Tonnies de-
scribed, family, friendship, and neighborliness are, in Hume’s work,
the natural determinants of sympathy. It is precisely because the
essence of passion or the essence of the particular interest is partiality
rather than egoism that sympathy, for its part, does not transcend
the particular interest or passion. “Our sense of duty always follows
the common and natural course of our passions.”? Let us follow the
argument through, even if we jeopardize the advantage of our dis-
tinction between egoism and sympathy: sympathy is no less opposed
to society than egoism is. “...[S]o noble an affection, instead of
fitting men for large societies, is almost as contrary to them, as the
most narrow selfishness.”’!°
No one has the same sympathies as another; given the plurality
of partialities, we arc confronted with contradiction and violence."
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This is nature’s course; there is no reasonable human language at
this level.
...[E]very particular man has a peculiar position with re-
gard to others; and ’tis impossible we cou’d ever converse
together on any reasonable terms, were each of us to consider
characters and persons, only as they appear from his peculiar
point of view.’
However, if sympathy is like egoism, what importance should we
accord to Hume’s observation that we are not egoistically but rather
sympathetically inclined? The truth of the matter is that, even if
society finds as much of an obstacle in sympathy as in the purest
egoism, what changes absolutely is the sense or the structure of
society itself, depending on whether we consider it from the point
of view of egoism or sympathy. Egoisms would only have to be
limited, but sympathies are another matter, for they must be inte-
grated inside a positive totality. What Hume criticizes in contrac-
tarian theories is precisely that they present us with an abstract and
false image of society, that they define society only in a negative
way; they see in it a set of limitations of egoisms and interests instead
of understanding society as a positive system of invented endeavors.
That is why it is so important to be reminded that the natural human
being is not egoist; our entire notion of society depends on it. What
we find in nature, without exception, are families; the state of nature
is always already more than a simple state of nature.’* The family,
independently of all legislation, is explained by the sexual instinct
and by sympathy—sympathy between parents, and sympathy of par-
ents for their offspring.’* We should rather understand the problem
of society from this angle, because society finds its obstacle in sym-
pathies rather than in egoism. Without a doubt, society is in the
beginning a collection of families; but a collection of families is not
a family reunion. Of course, families are social units; but the char-
acteristic of these units is that they are not added to one another.
Rather, they exclude one another; they are partial (partiales) rather
than made up of parts (partielles). The parents of one family are always
the strangers of other families. Consequently, a contradiction ex-
plodes inside nature. The problem of society, in this sense, is not a
problem of limitation, but rather a problem of integration. To in-
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CULTURAL WORLD AND GENERAL RULES
tegrate sympathies is to make sympathy transcend its contradiction
and natural partiality. Such an integration implies a positive moral
world, and is brought about by the positive invention of such a world.
It follows that the moral world is not reduced to a moral instinct
or to the natural determinations of sympathy.!® The moral world
afhirms its reality when the contradiction is effectively dissipated,
when conversation is possible as an alternative to violence, when
property supersedes greed, when “‘notwithstanding this variation of
our sympathy, we give the same approbation to the same moral
qualities in China as in England,” or, in a word, when “the sympathy
varies without a variation in our esteem.”?¢
Esteem is the factor which integrates sympathies, and the foun-
dation of justice. This foundation or this uniformity of esteem is not
the result of an imaginary voyage, which transports us in thought
to the most remote times and lands in order to constitute the persons
whom we take to be our possible kin, peers, and relatives. “It is not
conceivable how a real sentiment or passion can ever arise from a
known imaginary interest... .”7 The moral and social problem is
how to go from real sympathies which exclude one another to a real
whole which would include these sympathies. The problem is how
to extend sympathy.
We see the difference between morality and nature, or rather, the
lack of adequation between nature and morality. The reality of the
moral world requires the constitution of a whole, of a society, that
is, the establishment of an invariable system. This reality is not nat-
ural, it is artificial. “The rules of justice, in virtue of their universality
and absolute inflexibility, cannot be derived from nature, nor can
they be the direct creation of a natural inclination or motive.”"
All the elements of morality (sympathies) are naturally given, but they
are impotent by themselves to constitute a moral world. Partialities or
particular interests cannot be naturally totalized, because they are
mutually exclusive. One can only invent a whole, since the only
invention possible is that of the whole. This reveals the essence of
the moral problem. Justice is not a principle of nature; it is rather a
rule, a law of construction, and its role is to organize, within the
whole, the elements, including the principles of nature. Justice is a
means. The moral problem is the problem of schematism, that is,
the act by means of which we refer the natural interests to the political
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CULTURAL WORLD AND GENERAL RULES
category of the whole or to the totality which is not given in nature.
The moral world is the artificial totality wherein particular ends are
integrated and added to one another. Or again, the moral world is
the system of means which allow my particular interest, and also
the interest of the other, to be satisfied and realized. Morality may
equally well be thought of as a whole in relation to parts and as a
means in relation to ends. In short, the moral conscience is a political
conscience: true morality is politics, just as the true moralist is the
legislator. Expressed in a different way, the moral conscience is a
determination of the psychological conscience; it is the psychological
conscience apprehended exclusively in the aspect of its inventive
power. The moral problem is a problem of the whole and also a
problem of means. Legislation is a great invention and the true in-
ventors are not the technologists but rather the legislators. They are
not Asclepius and Bacchus but rather Romulus and Theseus.
Now, a system of directed means, a determined whole, is called
a rule or a norm. Hume calls it a general rule. The rule has two poles:
form and content, conversation and property, a system of customs
(moeurs) and stability of possession. To be in a society is first to
substitute possible conversation for violence: the thought of each one
represents in itself the thought of the others. But under what con-
ditions? Under the condition that the particular sympathies of each
one are transcended in a certain way, and surmount the correspond-
ing partialities or contradictions which they generate among people;
or under the condition that natural sympathy can be artificially ex-
ercised outside its natural limits. The function of the rule is to de-
termine a stable and common point of view, firm and calm, and
independent of our present situation.
Now, in judging of characters, the only interest or pleasure,
which appears the same to every spectator, is that of the
person himself, whose character is examin’d; or that of per-
sons, who have a connexion with him.2¢
Undoubtedly, such an interest touches us more feebly than our
own, or those of our kin, peers, and relatives; we are going to see
that it receives from elsewhere the vividness that it lacks. But at least
it has the practical advantage, even when the heart is not in it, of
being a general and immutable criterion, a third interest which does
41
CULTURAL WORLD AND GENERAL RULES
not depend on interlocutors—a value.?! “[E]verything, which gives
uneasiness in human action, upon the general survey, is call’d
Vice... .”2?
The obligation which is thus created differs essentially from nat-
ural obligation, natural and particular interest, or the motive of the
action: it is moral obligation or sense of duty. At the other pole,
property presupposes similar conditions. “I observe, that it will be
for my interest to leave another in the possession of his goods, provided
he will act in the same manner with regard to me.” Here the third
interest is a general interest. The convention of property is the artifice
by means of which the actions of each one are related to those of
the others. It is the establishment of a scheme and the institution of
a symbolic aggregate or of the whole. Hume thus finds property to
be a phenomenon which is essentially political—in fact, the political
phenomenon par excellence. Property and conversation are joined at
last, forming the two chapters of a social science.”* The general sense
of the common interest must be expressed in order to be efficacious.?5
Reason presents itself here as the conversation of proprietors.
From these first determinations, we can already see that the role
of the general rule is twofold, extensive and corrective. It corrects our
sentiments in making us forget our present situation.”° At the same
time, in terms of its essence, it “goes beyond the circumstance of
its birth.” Although the sense of duty “[is] deriv’d only from con-
templating the actions of others, yet we fail not to extend it even
to our own actions.’’?” Finally, the rule is that which includes the
exception; it makes us sympathize with the other, even when the
other does not experience the sentiment which in general corre-
sponds to the situation.
... [A] man, who is not dejected by misfortunes, is the more
lamented on account of his patience ...; and tho’ there be
an exception in the present case, yet the imagination is af-
fected by the general rule... . "Tis an aggravation of a murder,
that it was committed upon persons asleep and in perfect
security.”8
We must, of course, ask how the invention of the rule is possible—
indeed, this is the main question. How can we form systems of
means, general rules, and aggregates which are both corrective and
42.
CULTURAL WORLD AND GENERAL RULES
extensive? But we can already answer the following question: what
is it exactly that we invent? In his theory of the artifice, Hume
proposes an entire concept of the relation between nature and culture,
tendency and institution. Without a doubt, particular interests can-
not be made identical to one another, or be naturally totalized. None-
theless, nature demands that they be made identical. If not, the
general rule could never be constituted, property and conversation
could not even be conceived of, because sympathies are faced with
the following alternative: either to be extended through artifice or
to be destroyed through contradiction. As for the passions, they must
either be satisfied artificially and obliquely or be snubbed out by
violence. As Bentham will explain later on, even more precisely,
need is natural, but there is no satisfaction of need, or at least no
constant and enduring satisfaction, which is not made possible
through artifice, industry, and culture.2* The identity of interests is
therefore artificial, but only in the sense that it eliminates the natural
obstacles in the natural identification of the interests themselves. In
other words, the significance of justice is exclusively topological.
The artifice does not invent a principle other than sympathy. Prin-
ciples are not invented. The artifice guarantees to sympathy and to
natural passions an extension within which they will be capable of
being exercised, deployed naturally, and liberated from their natural
limits.*° Passions are not limited by justice; they are enlarged and extended.
Justice is the extension of the passions and interest, and only the
partial movement of the latter is denied and constrained, It is in this
sense that extension is correction and reflection.
There is no passion, therefore, capable of controlling the
interested affection, but the very affection itself, by an al-
teration of its direction. Now this alteration must necessarily
take place upon the least reflection?!
We must understand that justice is not a reflection on interest, but
rather a reflection of interest, a kind of twisting of the passion itself
in the mind affected by it. Reflection is an operation of the tendency
which restrains itself. “The remedy, then, is not deriv’d from nature,
but from artifice; or more properly speaking, nature provides a remedy
in the judgment and understanding, for what is irregular and in-
commodious in the affections.’*? The reflection of tendency is the
43
CULTURAL WORLD AND GENERAL RULES
movement that constitutes practical reason; reason is nothing but a
determined moment of the affections of the mind—a calm or rather
calmed affection, “grounded in a distinct view or in reflection.”
The real dualism, in Hume’s work, is not between affection and
reason, nature and artifice, but rather between the whole of nature
which includes the artifice and the mind affected and determined
by this whole. Thus, the fact that the meaning of justice is not
reduced to an instinct or to natural obligation does not prevent the
existence of moral instinct or natural obligation; above all, it does
not prevent the existence of a natural obligation to justice, once the
latter is constituted.*? The fact that esteem does not vary with sym-
pathy, and that it is unlimited, despite the fact that generosity nat-
urally limits itself, does not prevent natural sympathy or limited
generosity from being the necessary condition and the only element
of esteem: it is because of sympathy that we esteem.** That justice
is in the final analysis capable, in part, of constraining our passions
does not mean that it has an end other than their satisfaction,>> or
another origin other than their determination; it satisfies them
obliquely. Justice is not a principle of nature; it is an artifice. But
to the extent that humanity is an inventive species, even the artifice
is nature; the stability of possession is a natural law.°” As Bergson
said, habits are not themselves natural, but what is natural is the
habit to take up habits. Nature does not reach its ends except by
means of culture, and tendency is not satisfied except through the
institution. History is in this sense part of human nature. Conversely,
nature is encountered as the residue of history.** Nature is what
history does not explain, what cannot be defined, what may even be
useless to describe, or what is common in the most diverse ways of
satisfying a tendency.
Nature and culture form, therefore, a whole or a composite.
Hume repudiates the arguments which assign everything, including
justice, to the instinct,*? and the arguments which assign everything,
including the meaning of virtue, to politics and education.*° The
former, as they forget culture, give us a false image of nature; the
latter, as they forget nature, deform culture. Above all, Hume centers
his critique on the theory of egoism,*! which is not even a correct
psychology of human nature, since it neglects the equally natural
phenomenon of sympathy. If by “egoism” we understand the fact
44
CULTURAL WORLD AND GENERAL RULES
that all drives pursue their own satisfaction, we posit only the prin-
ciple of identity, A = A, that is, the formal and empty principle of
a science of humanity—moreover, of an uncultivated and abstract
humanity without history and without difference. More specifically,
egoism can designate some means only that humanity organizes in
order to satisfy drives, but not all possible means. Egoism then is
put in its place, and this place is no longer very important. At this
point one can grasp the sense of Hume’s political economy. In the
same manner in which he introduces a dimension of sympathy into
nature, Hume adds many other motives to interest—motives that are
often contradictory (prodigality, ignorance, heredity, custom, habit,
or “spirit of greed and endeavor, of luxury and abundance’’). Dis-
positions are never abstracted from the means which we organize in order
to satisfy them. Indeed, nothing is further from the homo oeconomicus
than Hume’s analysis. History, the true science of human motivation,
must denounce the double error of an abstract economy and a falsified
nature.
In this sense, the idea that Hume forms of society is very strong.
He presents us with a critique of the social contract which not only
the utilitarians but also the majority of the jurists opposed to “natural
law” would have to take up again. The main idea is this: the essence
of society is not the law but rather the institution. The law, in fact,
is a limitation of enterprise and action, and it focuses only on a
negative aspect of society. The fault of contractual theories is that
they present us with a society whose essence is the law, that is, with
a society which has no other objective than to guarantee certain
preexisting natural rights and no other origin than the contract.
Thus, anything positive is taken away from the social, and instead
the social is saddled with negativity, limitation, and alienation. The
entire Humean critique of the state of nature, natural rights, and the
social contract, amounts to the suggestion that the problem must be
reversed. The law cannot, by itself, be the source of obligation, be-
cause legal obligation presupposes utility. Society cannot guarantee
preexisting rights: if people enter society, it is precisely because they
do not have preexisting rights. We see clearly in the theory of prom-
ise which Hume proposes how utility becomes a principle opposed
to the contract.*? Where is the fundamental difference? Utility is on
the side of the institution. The institution, unlike the law, is not a
limitation but rather a model of actions, a veritable enterprise, an
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CULTURAL WORLD AND GENERAL RULES
invented system of positive means or a positive invention of indirect
means. This understanding of the institution effectively reverses the
problem: outside of the social there lies the negative, the lack, or
the need. The social is profoundly creative, inventive, and positive.
Undoubtedly, we could say that the notion of convention maintains
a great importance in Hume’s work. But we must not confuse con-
vention and contract. Placing convention at the base of the institution
signifies only that the system of means represented by the institution
is a system indirect, oblique, and invented—in a word, cultural. “In
like manner are languages gradually etablish’d by human conventions
without any promise.”
Society is a set of conventions founded on utility, not a set of
obligations founded on a contract. Thus, from a social point of view,
the law is not primary; it presupposes an institution that it limits.
Similarly, the legislator is not the one who legislates, but rather first
of all the one who institutes. The problem of the relation between
nature and society therefore stands on its head: there is no question
any longer of the relation between rights and the law, but rather of
needs and institutions. This idea implies an entire remodeling of
rights and an original vision of the science of humanity, that is, of
the new conception of psychosociology. Utility—that is, the relation
between institution and need—is therefore a fertile principle: Hume’s
general rule is an institution. Moreover, if it is the case that the
general rule is a positive and functional system finding its own prin-
ciple in utility, the nature of the link existing between it and the
principle of utility must be understood. “. . . [T]ho’ the rules of jus-
tice are establish’d merely by interest, their connexion with interest
is somewhat singular, and is different from what may be observ’d
on other occasions.”
The fact that nature and society form an indissoluble complex
should not make us forget that we cannot reduce society to nature.
The fact that humanity is an inventive species does not prevent our
inventions from being inventions. Sometimes Utilitarianism is given
a “functionalist” interpretation, on the basis of which society is ex-
plained by utility, and the institution by drives or needs. Perhaps,
there have been writers holding this interpretation, although even
this is not certain; at any rate, Hume is not at all the one who held
it. It is a fact that a drive is satished inside an institution. We speak
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CULTURAL WORLD AND GENERAL RULES
here of specifically social institutions, not governmental institutions.
In marriage, sexuality is satisfied; in property, greed. The institution,
being the model of actions, is a designed system of possible satis-
faction. The problem is that this does not license us to conclude that
the institution is explained by the drive. The institution is a system
of means, according to Hume, but these means are oblique and
indirect; they do not satisfy the drive without also constraining it at
the same time. Take, for example, one form of malrrtiage, or one system
of property. Why this system and this form? A thousand others
which we find in other times and places, are possible. The diferenes
between instinct and institution is this: an institution exists when
the means by which a drive is satisfied are not determined by the
drive itself or by specific characteristics.
These words, too, inheritance and contract, stand for ideas
infinitely complicated; and to define them exactly a hundred
volumes of laws, and a thousand volumes of commentators
have not been found sufficient. Does nature, whose instincts
in men are all simple, embrace such complicated and arti-
ficial objects and create a rational creature without trusting
anything to the operation of his reason? . . . All birds of the
same species, in every age and country, build their nest alike:
in this we see the force of instinct. Men, in different times
and places, frame their houses differently: here we perceive
the influence of reason and custom. A like inference may be
drawn from comparing the instinct of generation and the
institution of property.‘
__ If nature is the principle of resemblance and uniformity, history
is the scene of differences. The drive is general; it does not explain
the particular, even when it clearly finds in the particular the form
of its satisfaction. “Tho” the establishment of the rule, concerning
the stability of possession, be not only useful, but even absolutely
necessary to human society, it can never serve to any purpose while
it remains in such general terms.’’46
In brief, utility does not explain the institution. Private utility does
not, since the institution constrains it; nor does public utility fare
any better, since it presupposes an entire institutional world that it
/
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CULTURAL WORLD AND GENERAL RULES
cannot create, and to which it is only attached.4”7 What could then
explain the institution in its essence and in its particular character?
Hume has just told us that it is reason and custom; elsewhere he
said that it is the imagination, “or the more frivolous properties of
our thought and conception.”“* For example, is it or is it not enough
in order to become the owner of an abandoned city, to plant one’s
javelin in its gates?#? We will not answer the question merely by
invoking drives and needs, but rather by examining the relations
between drive, circumstance, and imagination. The javelin is the
circumstance.
Where the properties of two persons are united
after such a manner as neither to admit of division nor sep-
aration, as when one builds a house on another’s ground, in
that case, the whole must belong ... to the proprietor of
the most considerable part. ... The only difficulty is, what
we shall be pleas’d to call the most considerable part, and
most attractive to the imagination. .. . The superficies yields
to the soil, says the civil law: The writing to the paper: The
canvas to the picture. These decisions do not well agree
together, and are a proof of the contrariety of those prin-
ciples, from which they are deriv’d.*°
Without any doubt, the laws of association regulating the play
of the imagination are both the most frivolous and the most serious—
the principle of reason and the advantage of the fancy. But for the
moment, we need not be concerned with this problem. It suffices,
whatever the case, that we anticipate the following: the drive does
not explain the institution; what explains it is the reflection of the drive
in the imagination. We were quick to criticize associationism; we
forget too easily that ethnography brings us back to it, and that, as
Bergson also says, “‘among the primitives, we encounter many pro-
hibitions and prescriptions which are explained through a vague
association of ideas.” And this is not true only for the primitives.
Associations are vague, but only in the sense that they are particular
and varying according to the circumstances. Imagination is revealed
as a veritable production of extremely diverse models: when drives
are reflected in an imagination submitted to the principles of asso-
ciation, institutions are determined by the figures traced by the drives
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according to the circumstances. This does not mean that the imag-
ination is in its essence active but only that it rings out, and resonates.
The institution is the figure. When Hume defines feeling, he assigns
to it a double function: feeling posits ends and reacts to wholes.
These two functions, however, are one: there is feeling when the
ends of the drive are also the wholes to which sensibility reacts. But
how are these wholes formed? They are formed when the drive and
its ends are reflected in the mind. Because human beings do not have
instincts, because instincts do not enslave them to the actuality of a
pure present, they have liberated the formative power of their imag-
ination, and they have placed their drives in an immediate and direct
relation to it. Thus, the satisfaction of human drives is related, not
to the drive itself, but rather to the reflective drive. This is the
meaning of the institution, in its difference from the instinct. We
can then conclude that nature and culture, drive and institution, are
one to the extent that the one is satisfied by the other; but they are
also two insofar as the latter is not explained by the former.
Similarly, with respect to the problem of justice, the words “‘schema”
and “totality” are entirely justified, since the general rule never in-
dicates particular persons; it does not name owners.
Justice in her decisions, never regards the fitness or unfitness
of objects to particular persons ... the general rule, that
possession must be stable, is not apply’d by particular judg-
ments, but by other general rules, which must extend to the
whole society, and be inflexible either by spite or favour.*!
We have seen that the rule is established by interest and utility,
and that it is determined by the imagination. In this sense, it does not
determine real people; it is determined and modified in statements
reflecting situations and possible circumstances. This is how the sta-
bility of possession is divided between diverse rights: immediate pos-
session, occupation, prescription, accession, succession. But how can
the lack of adequation between real persons and possible situations
be corrected? This lack of adequation may itself be considered a cir-
cumstance or a situation. In that case, the mobility of persons will
be regulated by the agreed-upon transfer, when the object of the
transfer is present or particular, and by the promise, when the object
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CULTURAL WORLD AND GENERAL RULES
itself is absent or general.5? We must therefore in the case of the
general rule distinguish three dimensions which are nonetheless si-
multaneous: its establishment, its determination, and its correction.
Yet a difficulty is still present: sympathy, through general rules,
has won the constancy, distance, and uniformity of the true moral
judgment but has lost in vividness what it has gained in extension.
“The consequences of every breach of equity seem to lie very remote,
and are not able to counterbalance any immediate advantage, that
may be reap’d from it.”
The question is no longer how to specify the rule, but rather how
to provide it with the vividness which it lacks. The question is no
longer how to distribute but how to reinforce and enliven justice.
It was not enough then to single out by means of the imagination
the possible situations of the extension of justice; this extension must
itself become now a real situation. In an artificial way, the nearest
must become the most distant, and the most distant, the nearest.
This is the meaning of government. Human beings “cannot change
their natures. All they can do is to change their situation, and render
the observance of justice the immediate interest of some particular
persons, and its violation their more remote.’’>
We find here the principle of all serious political philosophy. True
morality does not address itself to children in the family but rather
to adults in the state. It does not involve the change of human nature
but the invention of artificial and objective conditions in order for
the bad aspects of this nature not to triumph. This invention, for
Hume, as for the entire eighteenth century, will be political and
only political. The governors, “being satished with their present
situation in the State,” apprehend the general interest under the
aspect of the immediate and understand justice as the good of their
life; for them, the most distant has become the nearest. Conversely,
the governed see the nearest become the most distant, to the extent
that they have “‘put it out of their own power, as far as possible, to
transgress the laws of society.”°* Government and property are there-
fore in almost the same relation that belief and abstraction are; in
the latter case, the question is about giving roles, and in the former,
it is about conferring vivacity. Thus, loyalty completes the list of
general rules. At this level, the theory of social contract is criticized
once again. There is no question of founding the government on
promise, because the promise is an effect of the specification of jus-
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CULTURAL WORLD AND GENERAL RULES
tice, and loyalty, its support. Justice and government have the same
source; they are invented to remedy similar inconveniences: the one
simply invents extension, the other, vividness. Being subordinate to
justice, the observation of the law of promises is, by the same token
and on a different level, the effect of the institution of government,
not its cause.5” The support of justice is therefore independent of its
specification, and is produced on another plane. Even so, or even more,
this support must be determined and distributed in its turn and, like
the specification, must, through its correction, make up for its lack
of adequation. The specifications of sovereignty will be long pos-
session, accession, conquest, and succession. The correction of sov-
ereignty will be, in rare and precise cases, a certain right to resistance
and a certain legitimacy of revolution. We must notice that the
permitted revolutions are not political. In fact, the main problem of
the state is not a problem of representation, but rather a problem of
belief. The state, according to Hume, is not charged with repre-
senting the general interest but rather with making the general in-
terest an object of belief. It succeeds in this by giving general interest,
mostly through the mechanism of its sanctions, the vividness that
only particular interests can have for us naturally. If the rulers, instead
of changing their situation, and instead of acquiring an immediate
interest in the administration of justice, were to subject the admin-
istration of falsified justice to their own immediate passions, then
and only then would resistance be legitimate, in the name of a
general rule.**
Up to now, a first series of rules has given to interest an extension
and a generality that interest did not have on its own: through this,
possession has turned into property, and stability of possession has
been achieved. A second series of rules has given the general rule
the presence and vividness that it did not have by itself. But the
obstacles which society had to conquer are not only the instability
of goods and the abstract character of the general interest. Society
is also faced with scarcity of goods.*? And stability, far from sur-
mounting this obstacle, aggravates it further as it provides possession
with conditions favorable for the formation of large properties.
Hume often elaborates the idea that, by means of an internal di-
alectic, property engenders and develops inequality. A third series
of rules is therefore necessary to correct both inequality and scarcity.
These rules will be the object of political economy. To the stability
Sf
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of possession and loyalty to government, the prosperity of commerce
is added at last. The latter “increases industry, by conveying it readily
from one member of the state to another, and allowing none of it
to perish or become useless.”®
With respect to Hume’s economic theory, only its main theme
will be discussed here. Like the two kinds of rules preceding, the
prosperity of commerce is also specified and corrected. Its specifi-
cations, that is, ‘monetary circulation, capital, interest, and export
show its relation with property. Its corrections, on the other hand,
show its relation with the state, that is, an accidental relation which
comes from outside. Commerce presupposes and involves a preex-
isting property: from an economic point of view, land rental is pri-
mary. The meaning of commerce in general is to guarantee landed
property (a political phenomenon) the economic equilibrium that it
does not have on its own. The rate of interest gives us a precise
example. By itself, ‘in civilized and populated nations,” property
puts the class of landowners face to face with the peasant class, the
former creating a continuous “demand for borrowing,” and the latter
not having the money necessary “‘to supply this demand.” The prog-
ress of commerce overcomes this contradiction between too many
loans and too few riches, in forming a “capitalist interest, and
“beget[ting] a number of lenders, and sink[ing] the rate of usury.”
As for the relation between commerce and the state, we will better
understand its principle if we realize that the prosperity of commerce
accumulates a working capital allowing for the ease and happiness
of the subjects, although the state can always in case of need demand
and reclaim this capital for itself.
It is a violent method, and in most cases impracticable, to
oblige the labourer to toil, in order to raise from the land
more than what subsists himself and family. Furnish him
with manufacturers and commodities, and he will do it of
himself; afterwards you will find it easy to seize some part
of his superfluous labour, and employ it in the public service,
without giving him his wonted return.
The state without method or rule acts brusquely and violently.
Its actions are repeated accidents imposed upon its subjects, and con-
52
oss
CULTURAL WORLD AND GENERAL RULES
trary therefore to human nature. In the methodical state, on the
contrary, there appears an entire theory of the accident as the object
of corrective rules: this state finds in commerce the possible affir-
mation of its power and the real condition of its subjects’ prosperity;
in this way, they both conform to nature.
We have often noticed that in the work of Hume and the utili-
tarians, economic and political inspiration differ greatly. In his book
on utilitarianism, Halévy distinguishes three currents: the natural
fusion of interests (sympathies) in ethics; the artificial identification
of interests in politics; and the mechanical identity of interests in
economics. We have in fact seen how these three currents relate.
First of all, we are not confronted with three currents. We should
also notice that the mechanics of the economy is no less artificial
than the artifice of legislation. Commerce no less than property is
an institution; and it presupposes property. But the economy, we are
told, has no need of a legislator or of a state. Undoubtedly, this
period, at the dawn of the development of capitalism, had not seen
or had only sometimes dimly foreseen that the interests of land-
owners, capitalists, and above all workers do not coincide in one and
the same interest. We must, however, seek the germ of such an idea,
concrete as it may be in other respects, in an idea which appears
frequently in Hume’s work. Property, according to him, presents a
problem of quantity: goods are scarce, and they are unstable because
they are rare. This is the reason why property calls for a legislator
and a state. On the contrary, the quantity of money, its abundance
OF scarcity, does not act on its own: money is the object of a me-
chanics. We could say that the essential, or perhaps the only theme
of Hume’s economic essays is to show that the effects which we
ordinarily attribute to the quantity of money depend in fact on other
causes. What is concrete in this economy is the idea that economic
activity involves a qualitative motivation. But sensitive to the dif-
ference between commerce and property, from a quantitative point
of view, Hume concludes that, in society the quantitative harmony
of economic activities is mechanically established, unlike what hap-
pens in the case of property.
In view of all this, we can set up the table of general rules or
moral categories as follows:
5S
CULTURAL WORLD AND GENERAL RULES
1. Content of the
general rule: the sta-
bility of possession;
2. Specification of
the general rules: im-
mediate possession,
occupation, etc.;
3. Correction of
the preceding speci-
fication by means of
general rules, prom-
ise, transfer.
1. Support of the
general rule: loyalty
to the government;
2. Specification of
support: long posses-
sion, accession, etc.;
3. Correction:
resistance.
5A
1. Complement of
the general rule: the
prosperity of com-
merce;
2. Specification of
the complement:
monetary circula-
tion, capital, etc.;
3. Correction:
taxes, state service,
etc.
THREE
THE POWER OF
THE IMAGINATION
IN ETHICS
AND KNOWLEDGE
Sometimes Hug says that the general rule is in essence the com-
bination of reflection and extension. The fact is that the two are
identical. The passions are extended because they are reflected; this
is the principle of the institution of a rule. But at other times Hume
says that we must distinguish between two kinds of non-identical
rules, that is, between determining and corrective rules, because the
former are more extensive than reflective.
Men are mightily addicted to general rules, and ... we often
carry our maxims beyond those reasons, which first induc’d
us to establish them. Where cases are similar in many cir-
cumstances, we are apt to put them on the same footing,
without considering, that they differ in the most material
circumstances. .. .!
These rules are characterized by the fact that they are extended
beyond the circumstances from which they arise. They do not ac-
count for the exception, and they misconstrue the accidental, con-
fusing it with the general or the essential: the disadvantages of cul-
ture are to be found here. As far as the second kind of rules is
concerned, that is, the corrective rules, they are more reflective than
55
IMAGINATION IN ETHICS AND KNOWLEDGE
extensive, precisely because they correct the extension of the deter-
mining rules. Instead of confusing the accidental with the general,
they present themselves as general rules concerned with the acci-
dental and with the exceptional.
[G]eneral rules commonly extend beyond the principles, on
which they are founded; and ... we seldom make any ex-
ception to them, unless that exception have the qualities of
a general rule, and be founded on very numerous and com-
mon instances.?
Corrective rules express a status of experience that accounts for
all possible cases; in the last resort, the exception is a natural thing,
and by means of habit and imagination, it becomes the object of
experience and knowledge (savoir), that is, the object of casuistics.
We are confronted here with two ideas in need of reconciliation:
extension and reflection are identical, but they are also different.
Two kinds of rules are distinguished, to the extent that they go
against each other; nonetheless they have the same origin and share
the same principle of constitution. We are thus led back to the main
problem: how is the rule possible?
If we begin with unity, the rule is simultaneously the extension
and the reflection of the passions. The passions are reflected; but
where and in what? They are reflected in the imagination. The
general rule is passion as reflected in the imagination. Undoubtedly,
the qualities of the passions, being principles of nature, have as their
special characteristic affecting and qualifying the mind; but, con-
versely, the mind reflects its passions and affections.
[E]verything, which is agreeable to the senses, is also in some
measure agreeable to the fancy, and conveys to the thought
an image of that satisfaction, which it gives by its real ap-
plication to the bodily organs.
Being reflected, the passions are found before an enlarged repro-
duction of themselves, and see themselves liberated from the limits
and conditions of their own actuality. They see, therefore, an entire
artificial domain opening up, that is, the world of culture; they can
project themselves in it through images and deploy themselves with-
56
IMAGINATION IN ETHICS AND KNOWLEDGE
out limit. The reflected interest transcends its own partiality. This
means that the imagination, filled with the images of the passions
and their objects, acquires ‘‘a set of passions belonging to it.’* In
reflection, the passions imagine themselves, and the imagination be-
comes passionate: the rule is possible. The real definition of a general
tule is that it is a passion of the imagination. “The imagination
adheres to the general views of Things. . . .”5
In this sense, we may distinguish three types of rules. The rule of
taste, first. We encounter the same problem here in a different form:
how does feeling overcome its inconstancy and become an aesthetic
judgment? The passions of the imagination do not require efficiency
of their object; nor do they require the kind of adaptation which is
characteristic of real objects. “These passions are mov’d by degrees
of liveliness and strength, which are inferior to belief, and indepen-
dent of the real existence of their objects.’ Virtue in rags is still
virtue; a deserted but fertile soil leads us to think about the happiness
of its possible inhabitants. “Sentiments must touch the heart, to make
them control our passions: But they need not extend beyond the
imagination, to make them influence our taste.””
Thus, taste is a feeling of the imagination, not of the heart. It is
a rule, and what grounds a rule in general is the distinction between
power and the exercise of power. Only the imagination can bring
this about, since it reflects both the passions and their object, sep-
arating them from their actuality and recuperating them in the mode
of the possible. Aesthetics is the science which envisages things and
beings under the category of power or possibility. A handsome man
in prison for life is the object of an aesthetic judgment, not only
because the vigor and balance of his body are separated from their
natural exercise and thus simply imagined, but also because the imag-
ination is in this case fascinated by those characteristics.? Hume de-
velops this thesis even more precisely in the case of tragedy. The
problem here is this: how is it that the spectacle of passions, which
are in themselves disagreeable and bleak, can come to delight us?
The more the poet knows how to affect, horrify, and make us in-
dignant, “the more [we] are delighted.” And, as Hume observes in
criticizing a thesis proposed by Fontenelle, it is not enough to say
that passions in tragedies are simply fictitious and weakened. This
is tantamount to seeing only one side of the solution, the negative
and cast important side. There is no difference of degree between
57
IMAGINATION IN ETHICS AND KNOWLEDGE
reality and art; the difference in degree is the condition of a difference
in nature. “It is thus the fiction of tragedy softens the passion, by
an infusion of a new feeling, not merely by weakening or dimin-
ishing the sorrow.”!°
It is not enough for the passion to imagine itself; the imagination
must also become passionate at the same time. Tragedy, because it
stages an image of passions, provides the spectators’ imagination with
passions. Just as the reflected interest transcends its partiality, so
reflected passions change its quality: the sadness and bleakness of the
represented passions are eliminated in the pleasure of the almost
infinite play of the imagination. The work of art has therefore its
own particular mode of existence, which is not the mode of a real
object nor the mode of an actual passion: the lesser degree of belief
is the condition for another kind of belief. Artifice has its own belief.
As for the second type of rule—the rule of freedom—we feel that
the will, which is a kind of passion, ‘‘moves easily every way, and
produces an image of itself even on that side, on which it did not
settle."
Finally, we are faced with the rule of interest and duty.
Two objects may be consider’d as plac’d in this relation, as
well when one is the cause of any of the actions or motions
of the other, as when the former is the cause of the existence
of the latter. ... A master is such-a-one as by his situation,
arising either from force or agreement, has a power of di-
recting in certain particulars the actions of another, whom
we call servant.’?
Hume analyzes with precision one more example of the relation
based on duty, that is the relation which links a wife to a husband.
As an object to real passion, a wife cannot give to the one who loves
perfect certainty and security: anatomy precludes it, the husband can
never be sure that the children are his own.” Reflected in the imag-
ination, this uncertainty becomes sublimated, takes on a social and
cultural content, and appears as the requirement for specifically fem-
inine virtues: a woman, to the extent that she is the object of a
possible passion, must always remain chaste, modest, and decent.
And when a general rule of this kind is once establish’d,
men are apt to extend it beyond those principles, from which
58
IMAGINATION IN ETHICS AND KNOWLEDGE
it first arose. Thus batchelors, however debauch’d, cannot
chuse but be shock’d with any instance of lewdness or im-
pudence in women."
It is therefore the imagination that makes the reflection of passions
possible. The general rule is the resonance of an affection in the
mind and the imagination. Rules reflect processes and ideas of prac-
tice. We must therefore modify our first scheme, which was still too
simple. Earlier we saw that the principles of nature and the qualities
of passions had to be studied solely in terms of their effect on the
mind. However, this effect is only the fact that the imagination is
affected and fixed; it is a simple effect. But now we see that we must
add a complex effect: the imagination reflects affection, and affection
resounds inside the mind. The mind ceases to be fancy, is fixed, and
becomes human nature. However, insofar as it reflects the affections
which fix it, the mind is still a fancy on another level and in a new
way. The fancy is reestablished in the principles of its own trans-
formation, for at least something within the affections escapes all
reflection. That which defines the real exercise of the affections, the
actuality of their limits, and the action by means of which affections
fix the mind in specific forms is precisely that which cannot, without
contradiction, allow itself to be reflected. Imagination, as it reflects
on the forms of its own stability, liberates these forms, and liberates
itself from them; it extends them infinitely. This means that it makes
the limit an object of the fancy, it plays with the limit by presenting
the accidental as essential, and separates power from its actual ex-
ercise. This illusion, says Hume, is an illusion of the fancy.’ The
power of the imagination is to imagine power. In short, the passions
do not reflect themselves in the imagination without the imagination
extending the passions. The general rule is the absolute unity of the
reflection of the passions in the imagination and the extension of the
passions by the imagination. It is in this sense that reflection and extension
are one.
But it is also in this sense that they are two, since subsequent
corrections are necessary in order to establish a rigor in this new
domain. This time, the reflection will be a reflection on the previous
reflection or, if you will, on the reflected interest. But why is it that,
in both cases, the same work “reflection” is used? It is because, in
our previous discussion, the extension was already a correction: it
transcended the partiality of the natural passions. But, because it did
59
IMAGINATION IN ETHICS AND KNOWLEDGE
not transcend nature without confusing essence and accident, it called
for a new correction of, and within, the new, important order it
instituted. In fact, it is not enough to think the artifice only through
fancy, frivolity, and illusion, for the artifice is also the serious world
of culture. The distinction between nature and culture is precisely
* the distinction between simple and complex effects. Hume, through-
out his work, shows a constant interest in the problems of animal
psychology, perhaps because the animal is nature without culture:
the principles act upon its mind, but their only effect is a simple
effect. Not having general rules, being held by the instinct to the
actual, lacking any stable fancy and reflective procedures, the animal
also lacks history. This is precisely the problem: how to explain that,
in the case of humanity, culture and history are constituted in the
way that the fancy is reestablished, through the resonance of affec-
tions within the mind. How can we explain this union of the most
frivolous and the most serious?
We have seen that, insofar as the passions are reflected, they nec-
essarily reflect themselves within the fancy. But, in fact, they resonate
within a fancy which is already settled, affected, and naturalized.
Evidently, the fancy is not settled by the qualities of the passions
but rather by those other principles of nature (the modes of asso-
ciation) which operate on a different level. This is the reason why
the rule determines itself. Only on this condition, the passions are
able to trace effectively constant and determined figures in the imag-
ination. Hume expressly indicates that “‘nature provides a remedy in
_ the judgment and understanding, for what is irregular and incommo-
dious in the affections.’’!6
Already in the case of aesthetics, the passions reflect themselves
through the principles of association, so that these principles provide
a detailed account of the rules of composition: “every kind of com-
position, is nothing but a chain of propositions and reasonings.”?”
Similarly, as we have seen, the rules of property, occupation, acces-
sion, and succession are determined through the principles of
association:
A person, who has hunted a hare to the last degree of wear-
iness, wou’d look upon it as an injustice for another to rush
in before him, and seize his prey. But the same person,
advancing to pluck an apple, that hangs within his reach,
60
.
IMAGINATION IN ETHICS AND KNOWLEDGE
has no reason to complain, if another, more alert, passes him,
and takes possession. What is the reason for this difference,
but that immobility, not being natural to the hare, but the
effect of industry, forms in that case a strong relation with
the hunter, which is wanting in the other?'®
The entire domain of the right is associationist. We expect that
an arbitrator or a judge would apply the association of ideas and decree
to which person or entity a thing is related inside the mind of an
observer in general.
’Tis the general opinion of philosophers and civilians, that
the sea is incapable of becoming the property of any nation;
and that because ’tis impossible to take possession of it, or
form any such distinct relation with it, as maybe the foun-
dation of property. Where this reason ceases, property im-
mediately takes place. Thus the most strenuous advocates for
the liberty of the seas universally allow, that friths and bays
naturally belong as an accession to the proprietors of the
surrounding continent. These have properly no more bond.
or union with the land, than the pacific ocean wou'd have;
but having an union in the fancy, and being at the same
time inferior, they are of course regarded as an accession.1"
In other words, with respect to the determination of the rules of
property and with respect to the understanding of history, the imag-
ination makes essential use of the principles of association: in fact,
its norm is the easy transition.”” Thus, the imagination, in the unity
that it forms with the simple effect of the principles of association,
has really the air of a constitutive imagination: it is quasi-constitutive.
But, one should not forget that, even in this case, it is the fancy
which, in the end, invokes the principles of association: having been,
in the case of knowledge, settled by the principles, it now uses them
to determine and explain in detail the world of culture. One then
sees the fundamental link between artifice and fancy, or the part
played by the most serious and the most frivolous. ‘“‘. .. I suspect,
that these rules are principally fix’d by the imagination, or the more
frivolous propertics of our thought and conception.”"
© Moreover, the reasoning that makes up the logical structure of a
ol
IMAGINATION IN ETHICS AND KNOWLEDGE
work is specious and merely plausible; “however disguised by the
colouring of the imagination,” it can still be recognized. Behind
the determined content of the rules of property and sovereignty, the
fancy pokes through; even more clearly, it declares itself in favor of
the weaknesses of these rules,” or of their mutual oppositions.*4 This
is why there are trials, or why juridical discussions can be endless.
Thus, in the case of occupation, namely in the case of the city and
the javelin, “I find the dispute impossible to be decided . . . because
the whole question hangs upon the fancy, which in this case is not
possess’d of any precise or determinate standard, upon which it can
give sentence.’’5
In the last analysis, the historian is perplexed.26 His perplexity links
up with the skepticism of the philosopher and completes it. This is
the reason why the determination of the rule must be corrected; it must
become the object of a second reflection, of a casuistics and a theory
of the accidental. We must fill the gap between the principles of the
understanding and the new domain where the fancy applies them.
At any rate, the illusion of the fancy is the reality of culture. The
reality of culture is an illusion from the point of view of the un-
derstanding, but it asserts itself within a domain where the under-
standing can not, and should not, seek to dissipate illusion. For ex-
ample, the necessity of an action, such as the understanding conceives
it, is neither a quality of the action nor a quality of the agent; it is
a quality of the thinking being which considers it. To the extent
that we, the agents, in performing the action, can not feel any ne-
cessity, we inevitably believe ourselves free.”” In this sense, the il-
lusion is no less real than the understanding which denounces it;
culture is a false experience, but it is also a true experiment. The
understanding has the right to exercise its critique only if we unduly
transform the powers of culture into real entities, and only if we
give real existence to general rules.”* Otherwise, the understanding
can do nothing. It allows its principles of association to be borrowed
in order for the world of culture to be determined. In this case, it
corrects the extension that these principles assume and composes an
entire theory of the exception, although the exception itself forms
a part of culture.
The core of the problem is to be found in the relations between the
passions and the imagination. The determination of these relations
62
IMAGINATION IN ETHICS AND KNOWLEDGE
constitutes the true originality of the theory of passions. Indeed,
what is the simple relation between the imagination and the passions
which will permit the latter to develop inside the former a complex
effect? The principles of the passions, like the modes of association,
transcend the mind and fix it. “Unless nature had given some original
qualities to the mind, it cou’d never have any secondary ones; because
in that case it wou’d have no foundation for action, nor cou’d ever
begin to exert itself.’29
But the qualities of the passions do not fix the imagination in the
way the modes of association do. The modes of association give the
ideas possible reciprocal relations, while the qualities of the passions
give the relations a direction and a sense; they attribute them with
a reality, a univocal movement, and hence with a first term. The
self, for example, is the object of pride and humility in virtue of a
natural and original property which confers a tendency or a dispo-
sition upon the imagination. The idea, or rather the impression of
the self, focuses the mind. “If a person be my brother I am his
likewise: But tho’ the relations be reciprocal, they have very different
effects on the imagination.”*! The imagination passes easily from
the farthest to the nearest, from my brother to me, but not from me
to my brother. And here is another example: “men are principally
concern’d about those objects, which are not much remov’d either
in space or time. .. .””52
Moreover, the tendency of the imagination is to move from the
present to the future: “We advance, rather than retard our exist-
ence.’”33 We see how both kinds of affections—relation and passion—
situate themselves vis-a-vis each other: association links ideas in the
imagination; the passions give a sense to these relations, and thus
they provide the imagination with a tendency. It follows, therefore,
that the passions need somehow the association of ideas, and con-
versely, that the association presupposes the passions. Ideas get as-
sociated in virtue of a goal, an intention, or a purpose which only
the passions can confer upon human activity.** We associate our ideas
because we have passions. There is therefore a mutual implication
between the passions and the association of ideas. “ ’Tis observable,”
says Hume, “of these two kinds of association,” that is, of the as-
sociation of ideas in knowledge and the association of impressions
in the passions, “that they very much assist and forward each
other. . . 3° Thus the imagination follows the tendency which the
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IMAGINATION IN ETHICS AND KNOWLEDGE
passions give it; the relation that they suggest, by becoming univocal,
has been made real. It is a simple component part, a circumstance
of the passions. This is the simple effect of the passions on the
imagination. But once again, the imagination is that in which the
passions, together with their circumstances, reflect themselves
through the principles of association. In this manner, they constitute
general rules and valorize things which are very distant, beyond the
tendency of the imagination. And this is the complex effect: on one
hand the possible becomes real, but on the other, the real is reflected.
Are we not, then, at this point capable of solving the problem of
the self, by giving a sense to Hume’s hope? We are indeed capable
of stating what the idea of subjectivity is. The subject is not a quality
but rather the qualification of a collection of ideas. To say that the
imagination is affected by principles amounts to saying that a given
collection is qualified as a partial, actual subject. The idea of sub-
jectivity is from then on the reflection of the affection in the imag-
ination and the general rule itself. The idea is no longer here the object
of a thought or the quality of a thing; it is not representational. It
is a governing principle, a schema, a rule of construction. Transcend-
ing the partiality of the subject whose idea it is, the idea of subjec-
tivity includes within each collection under consideration the prin-
ciple and the rule of a possible agreement between subjects. Thus,
the problem of the self, insoluble at the level of the understanding,
finds, uniquely within culture, a moral and political solution. We
saw that origin and affection could not be combined within the self
because, at this level, there subsists a great difference between prin-
ciples and the fancy. That which constitutes now the self is the
synthesis of the affection and its reflection, the synthesis of an af-
fection which fixes the imagination and of an imagination which
reflects the affection.
Practical reason is the establishment of a whole of culture and mo-
rality. That this whole can be presented in detail does not contradict
this statement, because it is a detail of general determinations and
not of parts.° How can this whole be established? The schematizing
imagination makes it possible, to the extent that the schematism man-
ifests and translates three properties of the imagination: imagination
is reflective, essentially excessive, and quasi-constitutive. But, at the
other end, theoretical reason is the determination of the detail of
nature, that is, of parts submitted to calculation.
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IMAGINATION IN ETHICS AND KNOWLEDGE
How is this determination possible? Surely it is not possible the
way the establishment of the whole of culture and morality is, for
we have seen that the system of the understanding and the system
of morality do not represent parallel affections of the mind. There-
fore a schematism must exist which is peculiar to theoretical reason.
Schematism, in this case, would no longer be the principle of con-
struction of a whole but rather the principle of the determination
of parts. The role of the principles of association is to fix the imag-
ination. But association, unlike the passions, has no need to be re-
flected in order to calm itself, or in order to constitute reason. It is
immediately calm, and “operates secretly and calmly on the mind.”*”
In this sense, reason is imagination that has become nature; it 1s
the totality of the simple effects of association, general ideas, sub-
stances, and relations. But then, since there are two kinds of relations,
there are two kinds of reason. In the case of the relations between
ideas, we must distinguish between those that “depend entirely on
the ideas which we compare together” (resemblance, relations of
quantity, degrees of quality, contrariety) and the relations of objects,
which “may be chang’d without any change in the ideas” (relations |
of time and place, identity, causality).** Similarly, we must distin-
guish between two kinds of reason: the reason that proceeds on the
basis of certainty (intuition and demonstration)** and the reason that
proceeds in terms of probabilities*° (experimental reason, understand-
ing). Undoubtedly, these two kinds of reason are merely two dif-
ferent uses of reason, in view of two kinds of relations, and must
have a common root—comparison. It would seem to follow that the
convictions they generate (certainty and belief) are not without re-
lation to reach other,*? despite the fact that they remain distinct. For
example, once we have shown that causality is not the object of
certainty or knowledge, the question remains whether or not the
understanding, whose object it is, produces it, or whether or not
causality is derived from probability.* The answer to this last ques-
tion would still be negative, but the arguments which support this
new negation lead us, at the same time, to understand the difference
between the two dimensions of reason.
The principle from which the causal relation is derived as an effect
has a gradual formation. Here, human nature does not by itself produce
its effect. “[C]an any one give the ultimate reason, why past experience
and observation produces such an effect, any more than why nature
alone show’d produce it?” According to Hume, human nature takes
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IMAGINATION IN ETHICS AND KNOWLEDGE
the detour of the observation of nature, or of an experience of na-
ture—and this is the essential. “As the habit, which produces the
association, arises from the frequent conjunction of objects, it must
arrive at its perfection by degrees, and must acquire new force from
each instance, that falls under our observation.’
We can see clearly at this point why causality cannot be derived
from probability.*” Actually, we must designate every determined
degree of habit as a probability,*® without forgetting that probability
presupposes habit as a principle. This presupposition is based on the
fact that each degree of habit is, in relation to an object, the mere
presumption of the existence of another object, like the one which
habitually accompanies the first object.4? The paradox of habit is that
it is formed by degrees and also that it is a principle of human nature:
“habit is nothing but one of the principles of nature, and derives all
its force from that origin.’’®°
The principle is the habit of contracting habits. A gradual for-
mation, to be specific, is a principle, as long as we consider it in a
general way. In Hume’s empiricism, genesis is always understood in
_ terms of principles, and itself as a principle. To derive causality from
probability is to confuse the gradual formation of a principle upon
which reason depends with the progress of reasoning. In fact, ex-
perimental reason is the result of habit—and not vice versa. Habit is
the root of reason, and indeed the principle from which reason stems
as an effect.5!
In its other use, however, that is, in the domain of the relations
of ideas, reason is determined immediately by the corresponding
principles, without a gradual formation and under the sole influence
of human nature. The famous texts on mathematics have precisely
this provenance.* Similarly, the definition of the relations of ideas,
“in the case in which the relations depend entirely on ideas that we
compare to one another,” does not mean that association is here, more
than elsewhere, a quality of the ideas themselves, nor that mathematics
is a system of analytic judgments. Whether as relations of ideas or
as relations of objects, relations are always external to their terms.
What Hume means is this: principles of human nature produce in
the mind relations of ideas as they act ‘“‘on their own” on ideas. This
is different from what happens in the case of the three relations
between objects, where the very observation of nature acts as a prin-
ciple. To the logic of mathematics, which we shall discuss later on,
06
IMAGINATION IN ETHICS AND KNOWLEDGE
there must therefore be juxtaposed a logic of physics or of existence,
and only general rules will bring about the latter effectively. From
the point of view of relations only physics is the object of a schematism.™4
To say that a principle of nature—in this case, habit—is formed
gradually is to say, in the first place, that experience is itself a prin-
ciple of nature.
Experience is a principle, which instructs me in the several
conjunctions of objects for the past. Habit is another principle,
which determines me to expect the same for the future; and
both of them conspir[e] to operate upon the
imagination. . . .5°
We must also note that habit is a principle different from experience, °
although it also presupposes it. As a matter of fact, the habit I adopt
will never by itself explain the fact that I adopt a habit; a repetition
will never by itself form a progression. Experience causes us to ob-
serve particular conjunctions. Its essence is the repetition of similar
cases. Its effect is causality as a philosophical relation. This is how
imagination turns into understanding. However, this does not yet
explain how the understanding is able to make an inference or to
reason about causes and effects. The real content of causality—reg-
istered by the term “always”—cannot be constituted in experience,
because, in a sense, it constitutes experience.*° One instance of rea-
soning does not render reasoning possible; nor is reasoning imme-
diately given in the understanding. The understanding must, from
a principle other than experience, derive the faculty of drawing
conclusions from experience, and also of transcending experience
and making inferences. Repetition by itself does not constitute pro-
gression, nor does it form anything. The repetition of similar cases
does not move us forward, since the only difference between the
second case and the first is that the second comes after the first,
without displaying a new idea.5” Habit is not the mechanics of quan-
tity. “Had ideas no more union in the fancy than objects seem to
have to the understanding, we cou’d never draw any inference from
causes to effects, nor repose belief in any matter of fact.’5*
This is the reason why habit appears as another principle, and +
causality as a natural relation or as an association of ideas.°? The
effect of this other principle is to turn imagination into belief,%
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IMAGINATION IN ETHICS AND KNOWLEDGE
thanks to the transition made from the impression of an object to
the idea of another. Thus, a double implication is sketched out. On
one hand, habit allows the understanding to reason about experience,
as it transforms belief into a possible act of the understanding.
“..[MJemory, senses, and understanding,” says Hume, “are, there-
fore, all of them founded on the imagination or the vivacity of our
ideas.”*! On the other hand, habit presupposes experience: once their
conjunction is discovered, objects are linked together in the imagi-
nation. We could even say that habit is experience, insofar as it
produces the idea of an object by means of the imagination and not
by means of the understanding. Repetition becomes a progression,
or even a production, when we no longer see it in relation to the
objects repeated, because, if we do, it changes, discovers and produces
nothing. It becomes a production as soon as we see it from the point
of view of the mind which contemplates it, for it produces a new
impression in it, ‘‘a determination to carry our thoughts from one
object to another’’®? and “to transfer the past to the future,’ that
is, an anticipation or a tendency. The fact is that experience and
habit are two different principles; they stand alternatively for the
presentation of cases of constant conjunction to the inspecting mind,
and for the union of these cases inside the mind which observes
them. Because of this, Hume always gives causality two related def-
initions: causality is the union of similar objects and also a mental
inference from one object to another.®
An analogy seems to be imposed between artifice (moral world)
_and habit (world of knowledge). These two instances, inside their
corresponding worlds, are at the origin of general rules which are
both extensive and corrective. But they do not function in the same
way. In the system of morality, the rules are invited to reflect in
general the principles of nature in the imagination. But, in the system
of knowledge, the condition of these rules is located in the very
particular character of a principle, not only insofar as it presupposes
experience (or something equivalent to experience) but also insofar
as it must be formed. Yet we would say that naturally this formation
has its own laws which define the legitimate exercise of a reasoning
understanding. We have seen that the formation of a principle was
the principle of a formation. Belief, says Hume, is the effect of the
principles of a prudent nature. The idea we believe is, by definition,
the idea associated with a present impression, the idea therefore that
o8
IMAGINATION IN ETHICS AND KNOWLEDGE
fixes the imagination, or the idea to which the impression com-
municates its vividness. This communication is undoubtedly rein-
forced through resemblance and contiguity,® but it finds its law
essentially in causality and habit. In the final analysis it finds its law
in the repetition of cases of constant conjunction of two objects
observed through experience. However, this is precisely where the
difficulty lies. Habit itself is a principle different from experience; the unity”
of experience and habit is not given.
By itself, habit can feign or invoke a false experience, and bring
about belief through “‘a repetition” which “is not deriv’d from ex-
perience.” This will be an illegitimate belief, a fiction of the imag-
ination. ‘“The custom of imagining a dependence has the same effect
as the custom of observing it wou’d have.” Thus, the imagination
will not allow itself to be fixed by the principle of habit, without
at the same time using habit for the purpose of passing off its own
fancies, transcending its fixity and going beyond experience.
“...[T]his habit not only approaches in its influence, but even on
many occasions prevails over that which arises from the constant and
inseparable union of causes and effects.’’”°
Beliefs produced in this manner, albeit illegitimate from the point
of view of a rigorous exercise of the understanding, no matter how
inevitable that may be, form the set of general, extensive, and ex-
cessive rules that Hume calls nonphilosophical probability. “An Irish-
man cannot be witty, a Frenchman cannot have solidity.” Hence,
despite first appearances, the understanding cannot count upon na-
ture for the immediate determination of the laws of its legitimate
exercise. These laws can only be the product of correction and re-
flection; the second series of general rules will stem from them. Only
when the understanding, through a new operation, resumes the act
of belief and holds it together with its principle within the limits
of past experience will the legitimate conditions of belief be rec-
ognized and applied; only then will they form the rules of philo-
sophical probability or the calculus of probabilities. (In this sense, the
extensive rules of the passions, in the moral world, must be corrected
as soon as they have been determined by the principles of association.
They must be corrected not only because, as it happens, these prin-
ciples have been involved and activated by the fancy on a level which
was not their own; they must be corrected because causality has
already, by itself and on its own level, a fanciful, extensive use. The
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IMAGINATION IN ETHICS AND KNOWLEDGE
understanding is able to correct the extensive rules of the passions
and to question itself on the nature of morality, because it must first
of all correct the extension of knowledge itself.)
Illegitimate beliefs or repetitions which are not based on expe-
rience, as well as nonphilosophical probabilities, have two sources:
language and the fancy. These are fictitious causalities. Language, by
itself, produces belief, as it substitutes observed repetition with spo-
ken repetition, and the impression of a present object with the hear-
ing of a specific word which allows us to conceive ideas vividly.
“W]e have a remarkable propensity to believe whatever is reported,
even concerning apparitions, enchantments, and prodigies, however
contrary to daily experience and observation.””!
The philosopher, having spoken continuously of faculties and
occult qualities, ends up believing that these words “have a secret
meaning, which we might discover by reflection.”””? The liar, having
continuously repeated his own lies, ends up believing them.” Not
only is credulity thus explained by the power of words, but also
education,” eloquence, and poetry.”
We have been so much accusom’d to the names of mars,
JUPITER, VENUS, that in the same manner as education infixes
any opinion, the constant repetition of these ideas makes
them enter into the mind with facility, and prevail upon the
fancy. ... The several incidents of the piece acquire a kind
of relation by being united into one poem or representation;
... and the vivacity produc’d by the fancy is in many cases
greater than that which arises from custom and experience.”
In brief, words produce a “phantom of belief,”’’ or a “counter-
feit,”’* which renders the most severe critique of language philo-
sophically necessary. Moreover, the fancy makes us confuse the es-
sential and the accidental. In fact, the counterfeit character of beliefs
depends always on an accidental characteristic: it depends not on the
relations between objects but on “the present temper and disposition
of the person.””® The fancy interprets the appearance of merely ac-
cidental circumstances accompanying an object as the repetition of
this object within experience.®° Thus, for example, in the case of a
man suffering from vertigo, “the circumstances of depth and descent
strike so strongly upon him, that their influence cannot be destroy’d
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IMAGINATION IN ETHICS AND KNOWLEDGE
by the contrary circumstances of support and solidity, which ought
to give him a perfect security.’
Thus, in the field of the understanding and in the field of morality,
the imagination is essentially exceeding. However, we can see the
difference. When knowledge is exceeded, we no longer find the
positivity of art; we find only the negativity of errors and lies. This
is the reason why correction will no longer be the institution of a
qualitative rigor, but rather the denunciation of error with the help
of a calculus of quantities. In the world of knowledge, and in the
case of the understanding, extensive rules are no longer the obverse
of a reflection of the principles in the imagination; they only translate
the impossibility of a preventive reflection bearing on the principle.
“...[W]hen we have been accustom’d to see one object united to
another, our imagination passes from the first to the second, by a
natural transition, which precedes reflection, and which cannot be
prevented by it.’8?
The imagination is able to believe only by falsifying belief in the
confusion of the accidental and the general. Habit is a principle
which cannot invoke experience without falsifying it, or without,
at the same time, invoking fictitious repetitions. Hence, the necessity
of an ulterior reflection which can only present itself as a correction,
a subtraction, a second kind of rules, or as a criterion for a quantified
distinction between the general and the accidental. “. . . [T]hese rules
are form’d on the nature of our understanding, and on our experience
of its operations in the judgments we form concerning objects.”
The object of philosophical probability or of the calculus of prob-
abilities is to maintain belief within the limits of the understanding
and to ensure conformity between habit and experience. Habit and
experience are the means by which fictions and prejudices are dis-
sipated. In other words, reasoning, in order to be absolutely legiti-
mate, must be born of habit “not directly ... but in an oblique
manner.’’** Undoubtedly, the characteristic of belief, inference, and
reasoning is to transcend experience and to transfer the past to the
future; but it is still necessary that the object of belief be determined
in accordance with a past experience. Experience is partes extra partes;
objects are separated in the understanding. “. . . [W]hen we transfer
the past to the future, the known to the unknown, every past ex-
periment has the same weight, and ... ’tis only a superior number
of them, which can throw the balance on any side.’’85
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IMAGINATION IN ETHICS AND KNOWLEDGE
We must determine the number of past experiences, and also the
opposition between parts and their quantitative agreement. To be-
lieve is an act of the imagination, in the sense that the concordant
images presented by the understanding or the concordant parts of
nature ground themselves upon one and the same idea in the imag-
ination. This idea must still find its content and also the measure of
its vividness, in the greatest number of similar parts offered separately
by the understanding.*°
The necessity of a critique of rules by rules is therefore confirmed.
The difficulty is that both kinds of rule, extensive and corrective,
‘ nonphilosophical and philosophical probability, insofar as they “are
al
in a manner set in opposition to each other,’”®’ are the effect of one
and the same principle: habit. They have the same origin. “The
following of general rules is a very unphilosophical species of prob-
ability; and yet ’tis only by following them that we can correct this,
and all other unphilosophical probabilities.”
However, because habit is not, in itself and by itself, confined to
the repetition of cases observed within experience, since other rep-
etitions can form it equally well, the adequation between habit and
experience is a scientific result that must be obtained, and the object
of a task that must be accomplished. This task is accomplished to
the extent that the act of belief bears exclusively upon an object
being determined in accordance with the nature of the understand-
ing, and in accordance with repetitions observed in experience.®
This determination constitutes the sense of corrective rules; the latter
recognize causality in the detail of nature, they allow us to know
when objects “become causes or effects,’ and they denounce, as a
consequence, illegitimate beliefs.*! In brief, habit has opposite effects
- upon the imagination and on the judgment: on one hand, extension,
and on the other, the correction of this extension.%2
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FOUR
GOD AND
THE WORLD
Ir we were to look for an example which would bring together all
the significations that we have successively attributed to general rules,
we would find it in religion. Four kinds of rule must be distinguished:
extensive and corrective rules of passions, and extensive and correc-
tive rules of knowledge. Now, religion participates equally in know]-
edge and in passion. In fact, religious feeling has two poles: po-
lytheism and theism. The two corresponding sources are the qualities
of the passions and the modes of association, respectively.! Theism
has its source in the unity of the spectacle of nature, in other words,
in the sort of unity which only resemblance and causality can guar-
antee in phenomena. Polytheism has its source in the diversity of
the passions and the irreducibility of successive passions.
Furthermore, religion, in each of these cases, is presented as a
system of extensive rules. Although the religious feeling finds its
source in the passions, it is not itself a passion. It is not an instinct,
says Hume, nor a primitive impression of nature. Unlike self-esteem
or sexuality, it is not naturally determined; rather it is a subject of
historical study.? The gods of polytheism are the echo, the extension,
and the reflection of the passions, and their heaven is our imagination
only. In this sense, we encounter once more the characteristic of the
extensive rule: religious fecling confuses the accidental with the
TS
GOD AND THE WORLD
essential. Its origin is in the events of human life, in the diversity
and the contradiction we find in it, and in the alternation of happiness
and unhappiness, of hopes and fears.? The religious feeling is awak-
ened in the strange encounters which we make in the sensible world,
and in the exceptional and fantastic circumstances or the unknown
phenomena which we (mis)take for essence, precisely because they
are unknown.‘ This confusion defines superstition and idolatry. “Bar-
barity, caprice; these qualities, however nominally disguised, we may
universally observe, form the ruling character of the deity in popular
religions.”
Idolaters are people of “artificial lives,’ the ones who make an
essence out of the extraordinary, the ones who look for “an im-
mediate service of the Supreme Being.”’ They are the mystics, the
fanatics, and the superstitious. Such souls throw themselves volun-
tarily into criminal adventures, because their common denominator
is that moral acts are not enough for them. Morality is joyless—after
all, morality is not picturesque; prestige belongs to vice: “Men are
even afraid of passing for good-natur’d; lest that should be taken for
want of understanding: And often boast of more debauches than
they have been really engag’d in. ...’”
But on the other hand, at the other pole, theism is also a system
of extensive rules. This time, though, the extension under consid-
eration is an affair of knowledge. Religion is, in this sense again, a
kind of overstride of the imagination, a fiction, and a simulacrum of
belief. It invokes a spoken repetition and an oral or written tradition.
The priests speak and the miracles rest on human testimony; how-
ever, the miracles do not immediately manifest a reality, but claim
for themselves the fitness that, generally, we are accustomed to find
between testimony and reality. Or again, in the proofs for the ex-
istence of God that are based on analogy between machines and the
world, religion confuses the general and the accidental. It does not
see that the world has but an extremely distant resemblance to ma-
chines, and that it resembles them only in terms of the most acci-
dental circumstances.? Why take human technical activity as the
base for the analogy, rather than another mode of operation—no
more and no less partial—such as, for example, generation or veg-
etation?"? Finally, in the proofs based on causality, religion transcends
the limits of experience. It aspires to prove God by His effect, that
is, the world or nature. But then sometimes, as in the case of
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GOD AND THE WORLD
Cleanthes," religion blows the effect out of all proportion, totally
denying disorder or the presence and intensity of evil, by constituting
God as an adequate cause of a world which it arbitrarily embellishes.
At other times, as in the case of Demea,? religion accords more
with the cause and establishes a disproportionate God. In the end,
it redescends to earth and remedies the lack of adequation by in-
voking unknown effects, the most important of which is future life.
It is evident that religion misuses the principle of causality. In fact,
there is no usage of causality in religion that is not illegitimate and
fictitious.
It is only when two species of objects are found to be con-
stantly conjoined, that we can infer the one from the other;
and were an effect presented, which was entirely singular,
and could not be comprehended under any known species, I
do not see, that we could form any conjecture or inference
at all concerning its cause."
In other words, there are no physical objects or objects of repetition
except in the world. The world as such is essentially the Unique. ”
It is a fiction of the imagination—never an object of the understand-
ing. Cosmologies are always fanciful. Thus, in Hume’s texts, in a
manner that differs from Kant’s, the theory of causality has two
stories to tell: the determination of the conditions of a legitimate
exercise in relation to experience, and the critique of illegitimate
exercise outside experience.
Religion, then, is a dual system of extensive rules. But how could
it be corrected? We understand easily that its situation, in knowledge
and culture, is very particular. Undoubtedly, the correction exists.
The miracle is subordinated to the world of knowledge: the evidence
drawn from testimony, to the extent that it claims to belong to
experience, becomes a probability entering calculations. It becomes
one of the two terms of an abstraction, whereas the other stands for
contrary evidence." In culture or in the moral world, corrective rules,
instead of confounding the exception, recognize it and include it,
creating thereby a theory of experience wherein all possible cases
find a rule of intelligibility and get to be ordered under a statute of
the understanding. In one of his essays, Hume analyzes an example
of this theory of the exception: suicide is not a transgression of our
GOD AND THE WORLD
duties toward God, nor of our duties toward society. Suicide is within
human powers, and no more impious an act than “to build houses”;
it is a power which should be used in exceptional circumstances.!>
The exception therefore becomes an object of nature. “Do you imag-
ine that I repine at Providence, or curse my creation, because I go
out of life, and put a period to a being which, were it to continue,
would render me miserable?”’'s
But the question now is the following: as religion is corrected,
what is really left of it? In both cases, correction seems to be a total
critique; it does not allow anything to subsist. Nothing is left of the
miracle; it disappears in an abstraction without proportion. The fig-
ures of the extension which we have previously studied—justice,
government, commerce, art, mores, even freedom—had a positivity
of their own, confirmed and reinforced as they were by the correc-
tions; they formed the world of culture. On the other hand, Hume
seems to exclude religion from culture, and all that goes with it.
When, in religion, words consecrate an object, while in the social
and legal spheres promising words change the nature of actions rel-
ative to some other objects, the sense is not the same.’” Philosophy
“is reaching completion here in a practical battle against superstition.
At the other pole, the corrective rules which make true knowledge
possible by giving criteria and laws for its exercise do not act without
expelling from the domain they define every fictitious usage of caus-
ality; and they begin with religion. In brief, it seems that, in the
domain of the extension, religion keeps only frivolity and loses all
seriousness. We understand why. Religion is indeed the extension
of passions and their reflection in the imagination. But in religion,
the passions are not reflected in an imagination already settled by
the principles of association in a way that would make seriousness
possible. On the contrary, there is religion only when these prin-
ciples are reflected in pure imagination and mere fancy. Why is that?
Because religion, by itself and in its other aspects, is only the fanciful
usage of the principles of association, resemblance, and causality.
Is nothing therefore left of religion? If this were the case, how
could we explain the final reversal of the essay “On the Immortality
of the Soul” and “The Essay on Miracles”? To believe in miracles
is a false belief, but it is also a true miracle.
And whoever is moved by Faith to assent to it, is conscious
of a continued miracle in his own person, which subverts
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GOD AND THE WORLD
all the principles of his understanding, and gives him a de-
termination to believe what is most contrary to custom and
experience.’®
The irony of Hume and his necessary precautions may be invoked
at this point. But even if it is correct to do so, it will not explain
the properly philosophical content of the Dialogues. In fact, religion
is justified, but only in its very special situation, outside culture and
outside true knowledge. We have seen that philosophy has nothing
to say on what causes the principles and on the origin of their power.
There, it is the place of God. We cannot make use of the principles
of association in order to know the world as an effect of divine
activity, and even less to know God as the cause of the world; but
we can always think of God negatively, as the cause of the principles.
It is in this sense that theism is valid, and it is in this sense that
purpose is reintroduced. Purpose will be thought, albeit not known,
as the original agreement between the principles of human nature and nature
itself. “There isa kind of pre-established harmony between the course
of nature and the association of our ideas.”
Purpose gives us therefore, in a postulate, the originary (originelle) unity |
of origin and qualification. The idea of God, as originary agreement,
is the thought of something in general; as for knowledge, it can only
find content in self-mutilation, after being identified with a certain
mode of appearance that experience manifests, or after being deter-
mined by means of an analogy which will necessarily be partial. “In
this little corner of the world alone, there are four principles, reason,
instinct, generation, vegetation,”?° and each one of them can furnish
us with a coherent discourse on the origin of the world. But if the
origin as such is thought but not known, if it is all these things at
the same time—matter and life as much as spirit—it is bound to be
indifferent to every opposition; it is beyond good and evil.?! Each
one of the perspectives we have of it has only one function—to make
us transcend the other perspectives which are equally possible, and
to remind us that we are always confronted with partial analogies.
In certain respects, purposiveness is more an élan vital, and less the
project or the design of an infinite intelligence.?? One could object
here that all order arises from a design; but that would be to suppose
the problem solved,”> to reduce all purposiveness to an intention,
and to forget that reason is but one modus operandi among others.
“Why an orderly system may not be spun from the belly as well as
V7
GOD AND THE WORLD
from the brain[?].’2* In this new state of affairs, what does the Idea
of the World become? Is it still a simple fiction of the fancy?
We have already seen two fictitious uses of the principle of causality.
The first was defined by repetitions which do not proceed from
‘experience; the second, by a particular object—the world—which
cannot be repeated, and which is not, properly speaking, an object.
Now, according to Hume, there is also a third, fictitious or excessive
causality. It is manifested in the belief in the distinct and continuous
existence of bodies. On one hand, we attribute a continuous existence
to objects, in virtue of a type of causal reasoning which has as its
ground the coherence of certain impressions.» Despite the discon-
tinuity of my perceptions, I admit “the continu’d existence of objects
in order to connect their past and present appearances, and give them
such an union with each other, as I have found by experience to be
suitable to their particular natures and circumstances.”’6
This is then the resolution of the contradiction that would arise
between the conjunction of two objects in actual experience and the
appearance of one of them only in my perception, without the ap-
pearance of its counterpart.?” But this resolution is based on a mere
fiction of the imagination: the inference is fictitious and the causal
reasoning, extensive. It transcends the principles that determine the
conditions of its legitimate exercise in general and maintain it within
the bounds of the understanding. In fact, I confer to the object more
coherence and regularity than what I find in my perception.
But as all reasoning concerning matters of fact arises only
from custom, and custom can only be the effect of repeated
perceptions, the extending of custom and reasoning beyond
the perceptions can never be the direct and natural effect of
the constant repetition and connexion.”
On the other hand, distinct existence rests on an equally false use
of causality, that is, on a fictitious and contradictory causality. We
affirm a causal relation between the object and our perception of it,
but never do we seize the object independently of the perception
that we have of it. We forget that causality is legitimized only when
past experience reveals to us the conjunction of two entitics.”” In
short, continuity and distinctness are outright fictions and illusions
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GOD AND THE WORLD
of the imagination, since they revolve around, and designate that
which, by definition, is not offered to any possible experience, either
through the senses or through the understanding.
It seems that all of this transforms the belief in continuous and
distinct existence into a specific case of the extensive rule. At first
glance, the texts which are about the constitution of this belief and
the texts which are about the formation of rules seem to parallel
each other. The imagination always makes use of the principles
which fix it, that is, of contiguity, resemblance, and causality, in
order to transcend its limits, and to extend these principles beyond
the conditions of their exercise.*° Thus, the coherence of changes
causes the imagination to feign yet more coherence, as it comes to
admit continuous existence.*! This. constancy and resemblance of
appearances cause the imagination to attribute to similar appearances
the identity of an invariable object. In this way, the imagination
feigns once again continuous existence in order to overcome the
opposition between the identity of resembling perceptions and the
discontinuity of appearances.?? The fact is, though, that this paral-
lelism between belief and rule is only apparent. The two problems,
although they are very different, complement each other. Contrary
to extensive rules, the fiction of continuity is not corrigible, it cannot
and should not be corrected. It maintains, therefore, different rela-
tions with reflection. Moreover, as far as the imagination is con-
cerned, its origin is very different from that of general rules.
We begin with the second point. Extensive rules can be distin-
guished from the belief in the existence of bodies by means of two
characteristics. First of all, the object of the extensive rules of knowl-
edge is a particular determination to which the imagination confers
the value of a law. It does so by borrowing, from the principles
which fix it, the power to go beyond principles; and it succeeds in
this by invoking an alleged experience or, in other words, by offering
the understanding a mere item of fancy, as though it were an object
which concerned it. Imagination offers the understanding as a gen-
eral, elaborate experience, the purely accidental content of an ex-
perience that only the senses have registered in chance encounters.
On the other hand, the imagination does not present to the under-
standing continuous and distinct existence as an object of possible
experience, nor does the understanding denounce the use of it by
the imagination as the object of a false experience. Undoubtedly,
7
GOD AND THE WORLD
there is no experience of continuous existence either through the
senses or through the understanding, because continuous existence
is not a particular object; it is the characteristic of the World in
general. It is not an object because it is the horizon which every
object presupposes. (Of course, we have already seen this in the case
of religious belief. But being more than an extensive rule, religious
belief appears now as something composite, made up of rules and
the belief in the existence of bodies. It participates in the rules to
the extent that it treats the world as a particular object and invokes
an experience of the senses and of the understanding.)
Second, on the basis of the belief in the existence of bodies, fiction
becomes a principle of human nature. The most important point is to
be found here. The entire sense of the principles of human nature
is to transform the multiplicity of ideas which constitute the mind
into a system, that is, a system of knowledge and of its objects. But
for a system to exist, it is not enough to have ideas associated in the
mind; it is also necessary that perceptions be regarded as separate
from the mind, and that impressions be in some manner torn from
the senses. We must give the object of the idea an existence which
does not depend on the senses. The objects of knowledge must truly
be objects. To that end, the principles of association do not suffice,
no more than the vividness of impressions or a mere belief does.
The system is complete when “a seeming interruption” of an ap-
pearance to the senses is surpassed “‘by [the] feigning [of] a continu’d
being which may fill those intervals, and preserve a perfect and entire
identity to our perceptions.”
In other words, the system is completed in the identity between
system and world. But, as we have seen, the system is the product
of the principles of nature, whereas the world (continuity and dis-
tinction) is an outright fiction of the imagination. Fiction becomes
principle necessarily. In the case of general rules, fiction draws its
origin and its force from the imagination, insofar as the latter makes
use of principles which fix it, and allow it therefore to go further.
In the case of the belief in continuity, the force of fiction is the force
of a principle. With the World, the imagination has truly become consti-
tutive and creative. The World is an Idea. Undoubtedly, Hume always
presents continuity as an excessive effect of causality, resemblance,
and contiguity, and as the product of their illegitimate extension.“
But, in fact, contiguity, resemblance, and causality do not, properly
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GOD AND THE WORLD
speaking, intervene as principles; they are the characteristics of cer-
tain impressions—precisely those impressions which will be lifted
from the senses in order to constitute the world.3* What is treated
as a principle is the belief in the existence of bodies, along with the
ground on which this belief depends.*
The belief in the existence of bodies includes several moments:
first, it includes the principle of identity, as a product of the fiction
by means of which the idea of time is applied to an invariable and
continuous object; then, it includes the confusion by means of which
an earlier identity is attributed to similar impressions; this confusion
is due to the easy transition (itself an effect of resemblance) that
resembles the effect created by the consideration of the identical
object; then one more fiction is included—that of continuous exist-
ence—which serves to overcome the contradiction between the dis-
continuity of impressions and the identity we attribute to them.”
And this is not all. It may indeed seem bizarre that Hume, in the
space of a few pages, first presents as satisfactory the conciliation
brought about by the fiction of a continuous existence,** and then
again as false and as dragging along with it other fictions and other
conciliations.2° The reason is that continuous existence is very easily
reconciled with the discontinuity of appearances. It can therefore
legitimately tie together discontinuous images and the perfect iden-
tity which we attribute to them. It is a fact that the attribution of
identity is false, that our perceptions are really interrupted, and that
the affirmation of a continuous existence hides an illegitimate usage
of the principles of human nature. To make things worse, this usage
is itself a principle. The opposition then is at its innermost state in
the center of the imagination. The difference [between] imagination
and reason has become a contradiction.
The imagination tells us, that our resembling perceptions
have a continu’d and uninterrupted existence, and are not
annihilated by their absence. Reflection tells us, that even
our resembling perceptions are interrupted in their existence,
and different from each other.
This contradiction, says Hume, is established between extension
and reflection, imagination and reason, the senses and the under-
standing.*' In fact, this way of phrasing the issue is not the best,
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GOD AND THE WORLD
since it can apply to general rules as well. Elsewhere, Hume says it
more clearly: the contradiction is established between the principles
of the imagination and the principles of reason. In the preceding chap-
ters, we have constantly shown the opposition between reason and
imagination, or between human nature and the fancy. We have seen
successively how the principles of human nature fix the imagination;
how the imagination resumes its operation beyond this fixation; and
lastly how reason comes to correct this resumption. But the problem
now is that the opposition has really become a contradiction: at the
last moment, the imagination is recuperated on a precise point. But
this last moment is also the first time. For the first time, the imag-
ination is opposed, as a principle, that is, as a principle of the world,
to the principles which fix it and to the operations which correct
it. To the extent that fiction, along with the World, count among
the principles, the principles of association encounter fiction, and are
opposed to it, without being able to eliminate it. The most internal
Opposition is now established between constituted and constitutive
imagination, between the principles of association and the fiction
which has become a principle of nature.
It is precisely because fiction or extension has become a principle,
that it can no longer be included, corrected, and even less eliminated
through reflection.*? We need a new relation between extension and
reflection. This is no longer the relation offered by the popular system
which affirms continuous existence, but rather the relation offered
by the philosophical system which affirms distinct and independent
existences: objects are distinct from perceptions, perceptions are dis-
continuous and perishable, objects are “uninterrupted, and .. . pre-
serve a continu’d existence and identity.’ “This hypothesis .. .
pleases our reason, in allowing, that our dependent perceptions are
interrupted and different; and at the same time is agreeable to the
imagination, in attributing a continu’d existence to something else,
which we call objects.’’45
But this aesthetic game of the imagination and reason is not a
reconciliation; it is rather the persistence of a contradiction, whose
terms we alternately embrace.** Moreover, it ushers in its own dif-
ficulties, involving, as we have seen, a new and illegitimate usage of
causality.47 The philosophical system is not initially recommended
to reason or to the imagination. It is “the monstrous offspring of
two principles ... which are both at once embrac’d by the mind,
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GOD AND THE WORLD
and which are unable mutually to destroy each other.’*8 This system
is a delirium. When fiction becomes principle, reflection goes on
reflecting, but it can no longer correct. It is thus thrown into delirious
compromises.
From the point of view of philosophy, the mind is no longer
anything but delirium and madness. There is no complete system,
synthesis, or cosmology that is not imaginary.*? With the belief in
the existence of bodies, fiction itself as a principle is opposed to the
principles of association: the latter are principally instead of being
subsequently excessive, as it is the case with general rules. Fantasy
triumphs. To oppose its own nature and to allow its fancies to be
deployed has become the nature of the mind. Here, the most insane
is still natural.5° The system is a mad delirium. Hume shows in the
hypothesis of an independent existence the first step toward this
delirium. Subsequently, he studies the manner in which independent
existence is formed in ancient and modern philosophy. Ancient phi-
losophy forges the delirium of substances, substantial forms, acci-
dents, and occult qualities*!—‘‘specters in the dark.”> But the new
philosophy has also its ghosts. It thinks that it can recuperate reason
by distinguishing primary from secondary qualities, but in the end
it is no less mad than the other.*? But if the mind is manifested as
a delirium, it is because it is first of all, and essentially, madness.** As
soon as extension becomes a principle, it follows its own way, and
reflection follows another way: two principles which cannot destroy
each other are opposed. “...{NJor is it possible for us to reason
justly and regularly from causes and effects, and at the same time
believe the continu’d existence of matter. How then shall we adjust
those principles together? Which of them shall we prefer?”°> The
worst is that these two principles are mutually implicated, since belief
in the existence of bodies essentially encompasses causality. But, on
the other hand, the principles of association, insofar as they constitute
the given as a system, generate the presentation of the given in the
guise of a world. It follows that the choice is to be made not between
one or the other of the two principles but rather between all or
nothing, between the contradiction or nothingness. “We have, therefore, ~
no choice left but betwixt a false reason and none at all.’’56 And this
is the state of madness. That is why, then, it would be vain to hope
that we could separate within the mind its reason from its delirium,
‘its permanent, irresistible, and universal principles, from its variable,
X.
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GOD AND THE WORLD
fanciful, and irregular principles.57 Modern philosophy hopes, and
there lies its error. We do not have the means of choosing the un-
derstanding over the suggestions of the imagination. “. . . [T]he un-
derstanding, when it acts alone, according to its most general prin-
ciples, entirely subverts itself, and leaves not the lowest degree of
evidence in any proposition, either in philosophy or common life.’’5*
The function of the understanding to reflect on something is ex-
clusively corrective; functioning alone, the understanding can do
only one thing ad infinitum—to correct its corrections, so that all
certainty, even practical certainty, is compromised and lost.
We have seen three critical states of the mind. Indifference and fancy
_are the situations proper to the mind, independently of the external
principles which fix it through the association of its ideas. Madness
is the contradiction in the mind between these principles which affect
it and the fiction which it affirms as a principle. Delirium is the system
of fictional reconciliations between principles and fiction. The only
resource and positivity offered to the mind is nature or practice—
moral practice and, based on the image of the latter, practice of the
understanding. Instead of referring nature to the mind, the mind
must be referred to nature. “I may, nay I must yield to the current
of nature, in submitting to my senses and understanding; and in this
blind submission I shew most perfectly my sceptical disposition and
principles.”
Madness is human nature related to the mind, just as good sense
is the mind related to human nature; each one is the reverse of the
cae
other. This is the reason why we must reach the depths of madness
and solitude in order to find a passage to good sense. I could not,
without reaching contradiction, refer the affections of the mind to
the mind itself: the mind is identical to its ideas, and the affection
does not let itself be expressed through ideas without a decisive
contradiction. On the other hand, the mind related to its affections
constitutes the entire domain of general rules and beliefs. This do-
main is the middle and temperate region, where the contradiction
between human nature and the imagination already exists, and always
subsists, but this contradiction is regulated by possible corrections
and resolved through practice. In short, there is no science or life
except at the level of general rules and beliefs.
H4
FIVE
EMPIRICISM
AND SUBJECTIVITY
We THOUGHT THAT we had located the essence of empiricism in the
specific problem of subjectivity. But, first of all, we should ask how
subjectivity is defined. The subject is defined by the movement
through which it is developed. Subject is that which develops itself.
The only content that we can give to the idea of subjectivity is that
of mediation and transcendence. But we note that the movement of
self-development and of becoming-other is double: the subject tran-
scends itself, but it is also reflected upon. Hume recognized these
two dimensions, presenting them as the fundamental characteristics
of human nature: inference and invention, belief and artifice. One
should then avoid attributing too much importance to the analogy,
often noted, between belief and sympathy. This is not to say that
this analogy is not real. But, if it is true that belief is the knowing
act of the subject, then his moral act, on the contrary, is not sym-
pathy; it is rather artifice or invention, with respect to which sym-
pathy, corresponding to belief, is only a necessary condition. In short,
believing and inventing is what makes the subject a subject.
From what is given, I infer the existence of that which is not
given: I believe. Caesar is dead, Rome did exist, the sun will rise,
and bread is nourishing. At the same time and through the same
‘operation, while transcending the given, I judge and posit myself as
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subject. I affirm more than I know. Therefore, the problem of truth
must be presented and stated as the critical problem of subjectivity
itself. By what right does man affirm more than he knows? Between
the sensible qualities and the powers of nature, we infer an unknown
connection:
. . (W)hen we see like sensible qualities that they have like
secret powers, (we) expect that effects, similar to those which
we have experienced, will follow from them. If a body of
like colour and consistence with that bread, which we have
formerly eat, be presented to us, we make no scruple of
repeating the experiment, and foresee, with certainty, like
nourishment and support. Now this is a process of the mind
or thought, of which I would willingly know the
foundation.!
We are also subjects in another respect, that is, in (and by) the
moral, aesthetic, or social judgment. In this sense, the subject reflects
and is refiected upon. It extracts from that which affects it in general
a power independent of the actual exercise, that is, a pure function,
and then transcends its own partiality.2 Consequently, artifice and
invention have been made possible. The subject invents; it is the
maker of artifice. Such is the dual power of subjectivity: to believe
and to invent, to assume the secret powers and to presuppose abstract
or distinct powers. In these two senses, the subject is normative; it
creates norms or general rules. We must explain and find the foun-
dation, law, or principle of this dual power—this dual exercise of
general rules. This is the problem. For nothing escapes our knowl-
edge as radically as the powers of Nature, and nothing is more futile
for our understanding than the distinction between powers and their
exercise.* How can we assume or distinguish them? To believe is to
infer one part of nature from another, which is not given. To invent
is to distinguish powers and to constitute functional totalities or
totalities that are not given in nature.
The problem is as follows: how can a subject transcending the
given be constituted in the given? Undoubtedly, the subject itself is
given. Undoubtedly, that which transcends the given is also given,
in another way and in another sense. This subject who invents and
believes is constituted inside the given in such a way that it makes
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EMPIRICISM AND SUBJECTIVITY
the given itself a synthesis and a system. This is what we must
explain. In this formulation of the problem, we discover the absolute
essence of empiricism. We could say that philosophy in general has
always sought a plan of analysis in order to undertake and conduct
the examination of the structures of consciousness (critique), and to
justify the totality of experience. Initially, it is a difference in plan
that opposes critical philosophies. We embark upon a transcendental
critique when, having situated ourselves on a methodologically re-
duced plan that provides an essential certainty—a certainty of es-
sence—we ask: how can there be a given, how can something be
given to a subject, and how can the subject give something to itself?
Here, the critical requirement is that of a constructivist logic which
finds its model in mathematics. The critique is empirical when,
having situated ourselves in a purely immanent point of view, which
makes possible a description whose rule is found in determinable
hypotheses and whose model is found in physics, we ask: how is the
subject constituted in the given? The construction of the given makes
room for the constitution of the subject. The given is no longer
given to a subject; rather, the subject constitutes itself in the given.
Hume’s merit lies in the singling out of this empirical problem in
its pure state and its separation from the transcendental and the
psychological.
But what is the given? It is, says Hume, the flux of the sensible, a
collection of impressions and images, or a set of perceptions. It is
the totality of that which appears, being which equals appearance;5
it is also movement and change without identity or law. We use the
terms “imagination” and “mind” not to designate a faculty or a prin-
ciple of organization, but rather a particular set or a particular col-
lection. Empiricism begins from the experience of a collection, or
from an animated succession of distinct perceptions. It begins with
them, insofar as they are distinct and independent. In fact, its prin-
ciple, that is, the constitutive principle giving a status to experience,
is not that “every idea derives from an impression” whose sense is
only regulative; but rather that “everything separable is distinguish-
able and everything distinguishable is different.”
This is the principle of difference. ‘For how is it possible we can
separate what is not distinguishable, or distinguish what is not dif-
ferent?’ Therefore, expericnce is succession, or the movement of
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EMPIRICISM AND SUBJECTIVITY
separable ideas, insofar as they are different, and different, insofar as
they are separable. We must begin with this experience because it is
the experience. It does not presuppose anything else and nothing else
precedes it. It is not the affection of an implicated subject, nor the
modification or mode of a substance. If every discernible perception
is a separate existence, “‘[it has] no need of any thing to support [its]
existence.”
The mind is identical to ideas in the mind. If we wish to retain the
term “‘substance,” to find a use for it at all costs, we must apply it
correctly not to a substrate of which we have no idea but to each
individual perception. We would then claim that “every perception
is a substance, and every distinct part of a perception a distinct
substance.”
The mind is not a subject, nor does it require a subject whose
mind it would be. Hume’s entire critique, especially his critique of
the principle of sufficient reason in its denunciations of sophisms and
contradictions,’ amounts to this: if the subject is indeed that which
transcends the given, we should not initially attribute to the given
the capacity to transcend itself.
On the other hand, the mind is not the representation of nature
either. Not only are perceptions the only substances, they are also
the only objects.!? The negation of the primary qualities corresponds
now to the negation of the principle of sufficient reason: perception
gives us no difference between two kinds of qualities. The philos-
ophy of experience is not only the critique of a philosophy of sub-
stance but also the critique of a philosophy of nature. Therefore,
ideas are not the representations of objects, but rather of impressions;
as for the impressions, they are not representative, nor are they ad-
ventitious;!? rather, they are innate.’ Undoubtedly, there is a nature,
there are real operations, and bodies do have powers. But we must
restrict “our speculations to the appearance of objects to our senses,
without entering into disquisitions concerning their real nature and
operation. ...”* And this skepticism is not so much a renunciation
as a requirement identical to the preceding one. The two critiques,
in fact, merge to the point where they become one. Why? Because
the question of a determinable relation with nature has its own
conditions: it is not obvious, it is not given, and it can only be posited
by a subject questioning the value of the system of his judgments,
that is, the legitimacy of the transformation to which he subjects
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the given, or the legitimacy of the organization which he attributes
to it. Therefore, the real problem would be to think, at the right
moment, of a harmony between the unknown powers on which the
given appearances depend and the transcendent principles which
determine the constitution of a subject within the given. The real
problem would be to think of a harmony between the powers of
nature and the subject. As for the given, in itself and as such, it is
neither the representation of the first nor the modification of the
second.
We might say that the given is at least given to the senses and
that it presupposes organs and even a brain. This is true, but one
must always avoid endowing, in the beginning, the organism with
an organization, an organization that will come about only when
the subject itself comes to mind, that is, an organization that depends
on the same principles as the subject. Thus, in a central passage,
Hume envisages a physiological explanation of association and sub-
jectivity: “... upon our conception of any idea, the animal spirits
run into all the contiguous traces, and rouze up the other ideas, that
are related to it.’’!
Hume himself presents this explanation as “probable and plau-
sible,” but, as he says, he neglects it willingly. When he appeals to
it, it is not in order to explain association, but rather, in order to
account for the errors resulting from the association.'® For if such
an organization of the brain provides us with a physiological model
applicable to the associative process, it nonetheless presupposes the
principles upon which this model depends and for which it cannot
account. In short, the organism and its senses do not immediately
and in themselves have the characteristics of human nature or of a
subject; they must acquire these somewhere else. The mechanism of
the body cannot explain the spontaneity of the subject. By itself and
in itself, an organ is merely a collection of impressions considered
in the mechanism of their appearance: “External objects are seen,
and felt, and become present to the mind; that is, they acquire such
a relation to a connected heap of perceptions. . . .”!7 In a word, we
always return to the same conclusion; the given, the mind, the col-_
lection of perceptions cannot call upon anything other than
themselves.
But as it calls upon itself, what exactly is it calling upon, since
‘the collection remains arbitrary, since every idea and every impres-
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EMPIRICISM AND SUBJECTIVITY
sion can disappear or be separated from the mind without contra-
diction??? How can we discuss the mind or the given in general?
What is the consistency of the mind? After all, it is not under the
category of quality that we must consider the mind as mind but
rather form the viewpoint of quantity. It is not the representative
quality of the idea but rather its divisibility that interests us at this
stage. The fundamental principle of empiricism, the principle of difference,
had already stated this; such was its meaning. The mind’s constant is
not a particular idea, but rather the smallest idea. An idea may appear
or disappear, I can always discover others; but sometimes smaller
ideas cannot be found. “In rejecting the infinite capacity of the mind,
we suppose it may arrive at an end in the division of its ideas.”
What is essential in an idea is not that it represents something but
rather that it is indivisible:
When you tell me of the thousandth and ten thousandth
part of a grain of sand, I have a distinct idea of these numbers
and of their different proportions; but the images, which I
form in my mind to represent the things themselves, are
nothing different form each other, nor inferior to that image,
by which I represent the grain of sand itself... . But what-
ever we may imagine of the thing, the idea of a grain of
sand is not distinguishable, nor separable into twenty, much
less into a thousand, or an infinite number of different ideas.”°
We call “moment of the mind” the reflection that relates ideas
or impressions”! to the criterion of division of ideas. The mind and
the given are not derived form such-and-such an idea but rather
from the smallest idea, whether it is used to represent the grain of
_ sand or a fraction of it. This is why, finally, the problem of the
status of the mind is the same as the problem of space. On one hand,
we ask whether or not extension is infinitely divisible. On the other
hand, the indivisible ideas, to the extent that they are indivisible,
constitute in a certain way extension. Hume presents these two theses
as the two intimately connected parts of the system.”
Let us consider the first part.?? To say that the mind has a finite
capacity is to say that “the imagination reaches a minimum.” Hume
calls this minimum “unity”? “indivisible point,’’° “impression of
atoms or corpuscles,”?’ “terminating idea.”* Nothing smaller exists,
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EMPIRICISM AND SUBJECTIVITY
and by “nothing” we should understand not simply ‘“‘no other idea,”
but also “no other thing in general.’’? The idea-limit is absolutely
indivisible. It is in itself indivisible to the extent that it is indivisible
for the mind and because it is an idea. Existence itself belongs to
the unit.*° This is why the mind possesses and manifests objectivity.
Hume’s entire theme reconciles the defects of the senses and the
objectivity of the given as follows: undoubtedly there are many
things smaller than the smallest bodies that appear to our senses; the
fact is, though, that there is nothing smaller than the impression
that we have of these bodies or the ideas that we form of them.?!
As for the second part of the thesis,32 we can see that it is deter-
mined by the first. The smallest impression is neither a mathematical
nor a physical point, but rather a sensible one.*? A physical point is
already extended and divisible; a mathematical point is nothing.
Between the two there is a midpoint which is the only real one.
Between real extension and nonexistence there is real existence
whose extension will be precisely formed. A sensible point or atom
is visible and tangible, colored and solid. By itself, it has no extension,
and yet it exists. It exists and we have seen why. In the possibility
of its existence and in the reason for its distinct existence, empiricism
discovers a principle. It is not extended, since no extension is itself
and atom, a corpuscle, a minimum idea, or a simple impression. “Five
notes play’d on a flute give us the impression and idea of time; tho’
time be not a sixth impression, which presents itself to the hearing
or any other of the senses.”’>* Similarly, the idea of space is merely
the idea of visible or tangible points distributed in a certain order.
Space is discovered in the arrangement of visible or tangible objects,
just as time is discovered in the perceptible succession of changing
objects.
Thus the given is not in space; the space is in the given. Space _
and time are in the mind. We should nonetheless note the difference
between time and space, for the latter can be given through two
senses only, those of sight and touch. In fact, for the idea of space
to exist it is necessary that the simple impressions, or the parts of
our impressions, be arranged in a way that is provided neither by
the other senses** nor, in the case of movement, by the impressions
of the muscles.*” Extension, therefore, is only the quality of certian
perceptions.** This is not the case with time, which is effectively
presented as the quality of any set of perceptions whatsoever.” “For
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EMPIRICISM AND SUBJECTIVITY
we may observe, that there is a continual succession of perceptions
in our mind; so that the idea of time being forever present with
us,’*40
We must then define the given by two objective characteristics:
indivisibility of an element and distribution of elements; atom and
structure. As Laporte observed, it is entirely incorrect to say that the
whole, in Hume’s atomism, is nothing but the sum of its parts, since
the parts, considered together, are defined, rather, according to their
mode of temporal, and sometimes spatial, appearance. This is an
objective and spontaneous mode, by no means indebted to reflection
or to construction. In fact, Hume makes this point about space in a
text whose second sentence should not be forgotten: “The perception
consists of parts. These parts are so situated, as to afford us the notion
of distance and contiguity, of length, breadth, and thickness.’’*1
We must now raise the question: what do we mean when we
speak of the subject? We mean that the imagination, having been a
collection, becomes now a faculty; the distributed collection becomes
now a system. The given is once again taken up by a movement,
and in a movement that transcends it. The mind becomes human
nature. The subject invents and believes; it is a synthesis of the mind.
We formulate three problems: what are the characteristics of the
subject in the case of belief and invention? Second, by means of what
principles is the subject constituted in this way? Which factors have
acted in transforming the mind? Finally, what are the various stages
of the synthesis that is brought about in the mind by the subject?
What are the stages of the system? We begin with the first problem.
Since we previously studied the mind from three points of view—
in relation to itself, in relation to the organs of the senses, and in
relation to time—we must now ask what becomes of these three
instances when the mind itself becomes a subject.
First, in relation to time. The mind, considered from the view-
point of the appearance of its perceptions, was essentially succession,
time. To speak of the subject now is to speak of duration, custom,
habit, and anticipation. Anticipation is habit, and habit is anticipa-
tion: these two determinations—the thrust of the past and the élan
toward the future—are, at the center of Hume’s philosophy, the two
aspects of the same fundamental dynamism. It is not necessary to
force the texts in order to find in the habit-anticipation most of the
characteristics of the Bergsonian durée or memory. Habit is the con-
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EMPIRICISM AND SUBJECTIVITY
stitutive root of the subject, and the subject, at root, is the synthesis
of time—the synthesis of the present and the past in light of the
future. Hume demonstrates this clearly when he studies the two
operations of subjectivity, namely, belief and invention. We know
what is involved in invention; each subject reflects upon itself, that
is, transcends its immediate partiality and avidity, by instituting rules
of property which are institutions making possible an agreement
among subjects. But what is it, in the nature of the subject, that
grounds this mediate agreement and these general rules?
Here, Hume returns to a simple juridical theory which will also
be developed by the majority of the utilitarians: each man expects to
conserve what he already possesses.4? The principle of frustrated
anticipation will play the role of the principle of contradiction in
the logic of property, that is, the role of a principle of synthetic
contradiction. We know that, for Hume, there are many states of
possession which are determined through complex relations: actual
possession before the establishment of society; occupation, prescrip-
tion, accession, and succession, after the establishment of society. Yet
only the dynamism of habit and anticipation transforms these states
into titles of property. Hume’s originality lies in the theory of this
dynamism. Anticipation is the synthesis of past and present brought
about by habit. Anticipation, or the future, is the synthesis of time
constituted by the subject inside the mind.
Such is the effect of custom, that it not only reconciles us
to anything we have long enjoy’d, but even gives us an af-
fection for it, and makes us prefer it to other objects, which
may be more valuable, but are less known to us.
Prescription is the privileged example in this respect. In this case,
it is not merely through a synthesis of time that the subject trans-
forms the state of possession into a title of property but rather the
state of possession is itself time and nothing else.
But as ’tis certain, that, however every thing be produc’d in
time, there is nothing real, that is produc’d by time; it fol-
lows, that property being produc’d by time, is not any thing
real in the objects, but is the offspring of the sentiments, on
which alone time is found to have any influence.“
Se
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EMPIRICISM AND SUBJECTIVITY
This is the most effective way to say that time and subject are in
such a relation with respect to each other that the subject presents
the synthesis of time, and that only this synthesis is productive,
creative, and inventive.
The same applies to belief. We know that belief is only a vivid
idea connected, by means of a causal relation, to a present impres-
sion.*® Belief is a feeling or a particular way of sensing ideas.* Belief
is the idea—the vivid idea—which is “felt rather than conceived.”
Therefore, if we wish to analyze this feeling, we must first investigate
the causal relation, since the latter communicates the vividness of
the present impression to the idea. In this analysis, feeling reveals
its source: once more, it is manifested as the result of the synthesis
of time. Indeed, what is the causal relation in its essence? It is
“_.. that propensity, which custom produces, to pass from an object
to the idea of its usual attendant.’ We rediscover, therefore, this
dynamic unity of habit and tendency, this synthesis of a past and a
present which constitutes the future, and this synthetic identity of
a past experience and of an adaptation to the present.”
Custom, then is the great guide of human life. ... Without
the influence of custom ... we should never know how to
adjust means to ends, or to employ our natural powers in
the production of any effect. There would be an end at once
of all action, as well as the chief part of speculation.°°
In short, the synthesis posits the past as a rule for the future.5"
With respect to belief, as with property, we always encounter the
same transformation: time was the structure of the mind, now the
subject is presented as the synthesis of time. In order to understand
the meaning of this transformation, we must note that the mind
includes memory in Hume’s sense of the term: we distinguish in
the collection of perceptions sense impressions, ideas of memory,
and ideas of imagination, according to their degrees of vividness.*
Memory is the reappearance of an impression in the form of an idea
that is still vivid. But, in fact, memory alone does not bring about
a synthesis of time; it does not transcend the structure, its essential
role becomes the reproduction of the different structures of the
given.® It is rather habit which presents itsclf as a synthesis, and
habit belongs to the subject. Recollection is the old present, not the
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EMPIRICISM AND SUBJECTIVITY
past. We should call “past” not only that which has been, but also
that which determines, acts, prompts, and carries a certain weight.
In this sense, not only is habit to memory what the subject is to the
mind, but also habit easily does without this dimension of the mind
which we call “memory”; habit has no need of memory, it does
without it ordinarily, in one way or another. Sometimes no evocation
of memories accompanies it,>* and sometimes, there is no specific
memory that it could evoke.* In a word, the past as such is not
given. It is constituted through, and in, a synthesis which gives the
subject its real origin and its source.
We are thus led to specify how we must understand this synthesis
of past and present, for this is not clear. Obviously, if we give ready
made the past and the present to ourselves, the synthesis is made on its
own; it is already formed and, therefore, no longer a problem. Also,
since the future is constituted through this synthesis of the past and
the present, it is no longer a problem either under these conditions.
Thus, when Hume says that the most difficult thing is to explain
how we are able to constitute the past as a rule for the future, it is
not easy to see where the difficulty lies. Hume himself feels the need
to convince us that he is not trying to create paradoxes.°°
In vain do you pretend to have learned the nature of bodies
from your past experience. Their secret nature, and conse-
quently all their effects and influence, may change, without
any change in their sensible qualities. This happens some-
times, and with regard to some objects: Why may it not
happen always, and with regard to all subjects? What logic,
what process of argument secures you against this suppo-
sition? My practice, you say, refutes my doubts. But you mistake
the purport of my question. As an agent, I am quite satisfied in
the point; but as a philosopher, who has some share of curiosity,
I will not say sceptism, I want to learn the foundation of this
inference.>”
In practice, there is no problem, for, once the past and the present
are given, the synthesis is given at the same time. But, in fact, the
problem is elsewhere. Present and past, the former understood as
the starting point of an élan and the latter as the object of an ob-
‘servation, are not characteristics of time. It would be better to say
EMPIRICISM AND SUBJECTIVITY
that they are the products of the synthesis rather than its constitutive
elements. But even this would not be exact. The truth of the matter
is that past and present are constituted within time, under the in-
fluence of certain principles, and that the synthesis of time itself is
nothing but this constitution, organization, and double affection.
This then is the problem: how are a present and a past constituted
within time? Viewed from this angle, the analysis of the causal relation
in its essential duality acquires its full meaning. On one hand, Hume
presents experience as a principle which manifests a multiplicity and
a repetition of similar cases; literally, this principle affects the span
of the past. On the other hand, he finds in habit another principle
inciting us to move from one object to a second which follows it—
a principle which organizes time as a perpetual present to which we
can, and must, adapt.
Now, if we consult the distinctions established by Hume in his
analysis of “the inference from the impression to the idea,’’>* we
could offer a number of definitions. The understanding is the mind
itself which, under the influence of experience, reflects time in the
form of a past entity subject to its observation. The imagination,
under the influence of the principle of habit, is also the mind which
reflects time as a determined future filled with its anticipation. Belief
is the relation between these two constituted dimensions. As he gives
the formula of belief, Hume writes: “[the two principles conspiring]
to operate upon the imagination, make me form certain ideas in a
more intense and lively manner, than others, which are not attended
with the same advantages.”’?
We have just seen how time is transformed when the subject is
constituted in the mind. We can now move on to the second point:
what happens to the organism? Earlier, the organism was presented
as the mechanism only of distinct perceptions. Now, to say that the
subject is constituted in the mind amounts to saying that, under the
influence of principles, the organism takes on a dual spontaneity.
First, it takes on a spontaneity of relation.© “. . . [U]pon our conception
of any idea, the animal spirits run into all the contiguous traces and
rouze up the other ideas, that are related to it.”°' We have already
said that for the animal spirits to find, in the neighboring traces into
which they fall, ideas which are tied to the one that the mind wanted
to see, it is, first, necessary that the ideas themselves be associated
in the mind. It is necessary that the mechanism of distinet perceptions
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EMPIRICISM AND SUBJECTIVITY
be divided again, in a certian way, within the body itself through a
physical spontaneity of relations—a spontaneity of the body that de-
pends on the same principles as subjectivity. Earlier, the body was
merely the mind, that is, the collection of ideas and impressions
envisaged from the point of view of the mechanism of their distinct
production. Now, the body is the subject itself envisaged from the
viewpoint of the spontaneity of the relations that, under the influence
of principles, it establishes between ideas.
On the other hand, there is a spontaneity of disposition. We have
seen the importance that Hume places on the distinction between
two kinds of impressions, namely,those of sensation and those of
reflection. Our entire problem depends on this, since the impressions
of sensation only form the mind, giving it merely an origin, whereas
the impressions of reflection constitute the subject in the mind, di-
versely qualifying the mind as subject. Undoubtedly, Hume presents
these impressions of reflection as being part of the collection, but,
first of all, they must be formed. In their formation, they depend on
a particular process and on principles of subjectivity. “. .. [NJor can
the mind, by revolving over a thousand times all its ideas of sensation,
ever extract from them any new original idea, unless nature has so
fram’d its faculties, that it feels some new original impression arise from
such a contemplation.” ®
The problem, thus, is knowing which new dimension the prin-
ciples of subjectivity confer upon the body when they constitute
impressions of reflection in the mind. The impressions of sensation
were defined by means of a mechanism, and referred to the body as
a procedure of this mechanism. The impressions of reflection are
defined by means of a spontaneity or a disposition and are referred
to the body as the biological source of this spontaneity. As he studies
the passions, Hume analyzes this new dimension of the body. The
organism is disposed to produce passions. It has a disposition which
is proper and specific to the passion in question, as an “original,
internal movement.” This is the case with hunger, thirst, and sexual
desire.“ One could object, nonetheless, that not all passions are like
these. There are passions, such as pride and humility, love and hatred,
love between the sexes, joy and sadness, to which no specific bodily
disposition corresponds. In this case, nature does not produce passions
“by itself immediately,” but “must be assisted by the co-operation
of other causes.” These causes are natural, yet not original. Here,
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in other words, the role of the bodily disposition is only taken up
by an external object which will produce passions in natural and
determinable circumstances. This means that, even in this case, we
can understand the phenomenon of the passions only through the
corporeal disposition: “As nature has given to the body certain ap-
petites and inclinations ... she has proceeded in the same manner
with the mind.”*” But what is the meaning of disposition? Through
the mediation of the passions, disposition spontaneously incites the
appearance of an idea, namely, an idea of the object corresponding
to the passion.®
We are left with the last, and more general, point of view: without
any other criterion, we must compare the subject with the mind.
But because this point is the most general, it already leads to the
second problem, mentioned earlier: what are the principles consti-
tuting the subject in the mind? What factors will transform the
mind? We have seen that Hume’s answer is simple: what transforms
the mind into a subject and constitutes the subject in the mind are
the principles of human nature. These principles are of two kinds:
principles of association and principles of the passions, which, in some
respects, we could present in the general form of the principle of
utility. The subject is the entity which, under the influence of the
principle of utility, pursues a goal or an intention; it organizes means
in view of an end and, under the influence of the principles of
association, establishes relations among ideas. Thus, the collection
becomes a system. The collection of perceptions, when organized
and bound, becomes a system.
Let us examine the problem of relations. We should not debate
futile points; we do not have to ask: on the assumption that relations
do not depend upon ideas, is it eo ipso certain that they depend on
the subject? This is obvious. If relations do not have as their causes
the properties of the ideas between which they are established, that
is, if they have other causes, then these other causes determine a
subject which alone establishes relations. The relation of truth to
subjectivity is manifested in the affirmation that a true judgment is
not a tautology. Thus, the truly fundamental proposition is that
relations are external to ideas. And if they are external, the problem
of the subject, as it is formulated in empiricism, follows. It is nec-
essary, in fact, to know upon what other causes these relations de-
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EMPIRICISM AND SUBJECTIVITY
pend, that is, how the subject is constituted in the collection of ideas. Re-
lations are external to their terms. When James calls himself a
pluralist, he does not say, in principle, anything else. This is also
the case when Russell calls himself a realist. We see in this statement
the point common to all empiricisms.
It is true that Hume distinguishes between two kinds of relations:
“such as may be chang’d without any change in the ideas”’ (identity,
temporal and spatial relations, causality), and those that “depend
entirely on the ideas which we compare together” (resemblance,
contrariety, degrees of quality, and propositions of quantity and num-
ber). It seems that the latter are not, in this sense, external to ideas.
And this is exactly what Kant believed, when he criticized Hume
for taking mathematics to be a system of analytic judgments. But it
is nothing of the sort. Every relation is external to its terms.
“, .. [L]et us consider, that since equality is a relation, it is not, strictly
speaking, a property in the figures themselves, but arises merely from
the comparison, which the mind makes betwixt them.””°
We have seen that the ideas can be considered in two ways, col-
lectively and individually, distributively and singly, in the deter-
minable collection where their own modes of appearance place them,
and in their own characteristics. This is the origin of the distinction
between the two kinds of relations. But both are equally external
to the ideas. Let us examine the first kind. Spatial and temporal
relations (distance, contiguity, anteriority, posteriority, etc.) give us,
in diverse forms, the relation of a variable object with the totality
within which it is integrated, or with the structure where its mode
of appearance situates it. One might say, though, that the mind as
such already provided us with the notions of distance and contigu-
ity.”! This is true, but it was merely giving us a matter—not actual
principles—to confront. Contiguous or distant objects do not in the
least explain that distance and contiguity are relations. In the mind,
space and time were only a composition. Under which influence (ex-
ternal to the mind, since the mind undergoes it as they do, and finds
in its constraint a constancy which it itself does not possess) do they
become a relation?
The originality of the reletion appears even more clearly in the
problem of identity. In fact, the relation here is a fiction. We apply
the idea of time to an invariable object, and we compare the rep-
‘resentation of the immutable object with the sequence of our per-
Sy
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ceptions.”2 And even more clearly we know that in the case of caus-
ality the relation is transcendence.”* If, now, the relations of the second
kind tend to be more confusing, it is because this second kind relates
only the characteristics of two or more ideas being considered in-
dividually. Resemblance, in the narrow sense of the term, compares
qualities; proportions compare quantities; the degrees of quality com-
pare intensities. We should not be surprised that, in this case, the
relations cannot change without [there being] a change in the ideas.
In fact, what is being considered, what gives the comparison its
subject matter is a specific, objectively discernible idea and not a
particular collection, effectively determinable but always arbitrary.
These relations are no less external. The resemblance between par-
ticular ideas does not explain that resemblance is a relation, that is,
that an idea can evoke the appearance of a similar idea in the mind.
The indivisibility of ideas does not explain that the unities consti-
tuted by them can be added, subtracted, made equal, or that they
can enter into a system of operations. Nor does it explain that the
lengths which they compose, in virtue of their arrangement, can be
measured and evaluated. Here, we recognize the two distinct problems
of arithmetic and geometry. The relation always presupposes a syn-
thesis, and neither the idea nor the mind can account for it. The
relation, in a way, designates “that particular circumstance, in which
... we may think proper to compare [two ideas].””* “To think
proper” is the best expression; it is, in fact, a normative expression.
The problem is to find the norms of this judgment, of this decision,
and the norms of subjectivity. In the last analysis, we will have to
speak about Hume’s voluntarism, but then the problem would be to
show the principles of this will which are independent of the char-
acteristics of the mind.
These principles are, first of all, those of association: contiguity,
resemblance, and causality. Evidently these notions should be given
a meaning different from the ones given earlier, when they were
presented only as examples of relations. Relations are the effect of the
principles of association. These principles naturalize and give con-
stancy to the mind. It seems that each of them is specifically addressed
to one aspect of the mind: contiguity, to the senses; causality, to
time; resemblance, to imagination.?> Their common point is the
designation of a quality that leads the mind naturally from one idea
to another.”* We already know the meaning that we must yive to
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the term “quality.” That an idea naturally introduces another is not
a quality of the idea, but rather a quality of human nature. Only
human nature is qualificatory. A collection of ideas will never explain
how the same simple ideas are regularly grouped into complex ideas.
Ideas, “most suited. to be united in a complex idea,” must be designated
to each one of us. These ideas are not designated within the mind
without the mind becoming subject—a subject to whom these ideas
are designated, a subject who speaks. Ideas are designated in the mind
at the same time that the mind itself becomes a subject. In short,
the effects of the principle of association are complex ideas: relations,
substances and modes, general ideas. Under the influence of the
principles of association, ideas are compared, grouped, and evoked.
This relation, or rather this intimacy, between complex ideas and
the subject, such that one is the inverse of the others, is presented ‘
to us in language; the subject, as she speaks, designates in some way
ideas which are in turn designated to her.
Relations are external to their terms. This means that ideas do
not account for the nature of the operations that we perform on
them, and especially of the relations that we establish among them.
The principles of human nature, or the principles of association, are
the necessary conditions of relations. But has the problem been re-
solved? When Hume defines the relation as “this particular circum-
stance for the sake of which we think proper to compare two ideas,”
he adds: “even when the latter are arbitrarily linked in the imagi-
nation” —that is, even when the one does not naturally introduce the
other. In fact, association is insufficient to explain relations. Un-
doubtedly, it alone makes them possible. Undoubtedly, it accounts
entirely for immediate or direct relations, that is, those that are
established between two ideas without the intervention of another
idea of the collection. For example, it explains the relation between
two, immediately adjacent shades of blue, or between two contiguous
objects, etc. Let us say that it explains that A=B and B=C; but it
does not explain that A=C or that distance itself is a relation.’
Later, we will see that Hume calls that which the association explains
a “natural relation,” and that which it does not suffice to explain a
“philosophical relation.” He insists heavily on this point: the char-
acteristic of nature is to be natural, easy going, and immediate. In
meditations, it loses its force and vividness, that is, its effect. Inter-
‘mediaries exhaust it and, to cach one, it loses something of itself:
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EMPIRICISM AND SUBJECTIVITY
Where the mind reaches not its objects with easiness and
facility, the same principles have not the same effect as in a
more natural conception of the ideas; nor does the imagi-
nation feel a sensation, which holds any proportion with
that which arises from its common judgments and
opinions.”
How can the mediations (or the relations that are established
between the most remote objects) be justified? Resemblance, Hume
claims, does not always produce ‘“‘a connexion or association of ideas.
When a quality becomes very general, and is common to a great many
individuals, it leads not the mind directly to anyone of them; but by presenting
at once too great a choice, does thereby prevent the imagination from fixing
on any single object.”
Most of the objections raised against associationism amount to
this: the principles of association explain, at best, the form of think-
ing in general and not its particular contents. Association explains
only the surface or “the crust” of our consciousness. Writers as
different as Bergson and Freud converge on this point. Bergson, in
a famous passage, writes:
For we should seek in vain for two ideas which have not
some point of resemblance, or which do not touch each
other somewhere. To take similarity first: however profound
are the differences which separate two images, we shall al-
ways find, if we go back high enough, a common genus to
which they belong, and consequently a resemblance which
may serve as a connecting link between them. ... This is
as much as to say that between any two ideas chosen at
random there is always a resemblance, and always, even,
contiguity; so that when we discover a relation of contiguity
or of resemblance between two successive ideas, we have in
no way explained why the one evokes the other. What we
really need to discover is how a choice is affected among an
infinite number of recollections which all resemble in some
way the present perception, and why only one of them—
this rather than that—emerges into the light of conscious-
ness.®°
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The least that we can say is that Hume thought of it first. In his
work, the association of ideas accounts effectively for habits of thought,
everyday notions of good sense, current ideas, and complexes of ideas which
correspond to the most general and most constant needs common to all minds
and all languages.8' What it does not account for is the difference
between one mind and another. The specific progress of a mind must
be studied, and there is an entire casuistry to be worked out: why
does this perception evoke a specific idea, rather than another, in a
particular consciousness at a particular moment? The association of
ideas does not explain that this idea has been evoked instead of
another. It follows that, from this point of view, we must define
relation as ‘‘. .. that particular circumstance, in which, even upon the
arbitrary union of two ideas in the fancy, we may think proper to com-
pare them.’”? If it is true that association is necessary in order to
make all relations in general possible, each particular relation is not
in the least explained by the association. Circumstance gives the re-
lation its sufficient reason.
The notion “circumstance” appears constantly in Hume’s phi-
losophy. It is at the center of history and it makes possible a science
of the particular and a differential psychology. When Freud and
Bergson demonstrate that the association of ideas explains only that
which is superficial in us, that is, only the formalism of consciousness,
they mean, essentially, that only affectivity can justify the singular
content, the profound and the particular. And they are right. But
Hume has never said anything else. He merely thought that the
superficial and the formal should also be explained, and that this task
was, in a sense, the most important. And for the rest, he appeals to
circumstance. This notion, for him, always refers to affectivity. We
must take literally the idea that affectivity is a matter of circum-
stances. These are precisely the variables that define our passions and
our interests. Understood in this way, a set of circumstances always
individuates a subject since it represents a state of its passions and
needs, an allocation of its interests, a distribution of its beliefs and
exhilarations.** As a result, we see that the principles of the passions
must be combined with the principles of association in order for the
subject to constitute itself within the mind. If the principles of as-
sociation explain that ideas are associated, only the principles of the
passions can explain that a particular idea, rather than another, is
associated at a piven moment.
¥
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Circumstances are not only required by relations; they are also re-
quired by substances and modes, as well as by general ideas.
As the individuals are collected together, and plac’d under
a general term with a view to that resemblance, which they
bear to each other, this relation must facilitate their entrance
in the imagination, and make them be suggested more read-
ily upon occasion. ... Nothing is more admirable, than the
readiness, with which the imagination suggests its ideas, and
presents them at the very instant, in which they become necessary
or useful.84
We see that, in all cases, the subject is presented in the mind
under the influence of two kinds of combined principles. Everything
takes place as if the principles of association provided the subject
with its necessary form, whereas the principles of the passions pro-
vided it with its singular content. The latter function as the principle
for the individuation of the subject. This duality, however, does not
signify an opposition between the singular and the universal. The
principles of the passions are no less universal or constant than the
others. They define laws in which circumstances only act as variables.
They do indeed involve the individual, but only in the precise sense
in which a science of the individual can be, and is, developed. We
must then ask, in the third and last problem that remains to be solved,
what is the difference between, and unity of, these two kinds of
prtinciples—a unity that must be followed and disengaged form every
step of this combined action. Yet, we can already, at least, foresee
how this unity will manifest itself within the subject. If the relation
cannot be separated from the circumstances, if the subject cannot be
. separated from the singular content which is strictly essential to it,
it is because subjectivity is essentially practical. Its definitive unity—
that is, the unity of relations and circumstances—will be revealed in
the relations between motive and action, means and end. These re-
lations, means-end, motive-action, are indeed relations, but they are also
something more. The fact that there is no theoretical subjectivity, and
that there cannot be one, becomes the fundamental claim of em-
piricism. And, if we examine it closely, it is merely another way of
saying that the subject is constituted within the given. If the subject
is constituted within the given, then, in fact, there is only a practical
subject.
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PRINCIPLES OF
HUMAN NATURE
ATOMISM Is THE theory of ideas, insofar as relations are external to
them. Associationism is the theory of relations, insofar as relations
are external to ideas, in other words, insofar as they depend on other
causes. Now, in both cases, we have seen how much we must distrust
the objections often raised against Hume’s empiricism. We shouldn’t,
of course, present Hume as an exceptional victim, who more than
others has felt the unfairness of constant criticisms. The case is sim-
ilar for all great philosophers. We are surprised by the objections
constantly raised against Descartes, Kant, Hegel, etc. Let us say that
philosophical objections are of two kinds. Most are philosophical in
name only, to the extent that they are criticisms of the theory with-
out any consideration of the nature of the problem to which the
theory is responding, or the problem which provides the theory with
its foundation and structure. Thus Hume is reproached for the
“atomization” of the given. Critics believe that an entire system can
be adequately denounced by showing its basis in Hume’s personal
views, a particular taste of his own, or the spirit of his time. What
a philosopher says is offered as if it were what he does or as what he
wants. We are presented with a fictitious psychology of the intentions
of the theorist, as if it were a sufficient criticism of the theory.
Atomism and associationism are therefore treated as shifty projects
which disqualify, ab initio, those who form them. “Hume has pul-
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PRINCIPLES OF HUMAN NATURE
verized the given.” But what does one think has been explained by
this? Does one believe something important has been said? We must
understand what a philosophical theory is, the basis of its concept,
for it is not born from itself or for the fun of it. It is not even enough
to say that it is a response to a set of problems. Undoubtedly, this
explanation has the advantage, at least, of locating the necessity for
a theory in a relation to something that can serve as its foundation,
but this relation would be scientific rather than philosophical. In
fact, a philosophical theory is an elaborately developed question, and
nothing else; by itself and in itself, it is not the resolution to a
problem, but the elaboration, to the very end, of the necessary im-
plications of a formulated question. It shows us what things are, or
what things should be, on the assumption that the question is good
and rigorous. To put something in question means subordinating
and subjecting things to the question, intending, through this con-
strained and forced subsumption, that they reveal an essence or a
nature. To criticize the question means showing under what con-
ditions the question is possible and correctly raised; in other words,
how things would not be what they are were the question different
from the one formulated. This means that these two operations are
one and the same; the question is always about the necessary de-
velopment of the implications of a problem and about giving sense
to philosophy as theory. In philosophy, the question and the critique
of the question are one; or, if you wish, there is no critique of
solutions, there are only critiques of problems. For example, in the
case of Descartes, the doubt is problematic not simply because it is
provisional but rather because the doubt is the statement—pushed to
the limit—of the conditions of the problem to which the cogito re-
sponds or, rather, of the question whose first implications the cogito
develops. In this sense, we can see that most of the objections raised
against the great philosophers are empty. People say to them: things
are not like that. But, in fact, it is not a matter of knowing whether
things are like that or not; it is a matter of knowing whether the
question which presents things in such a light is good or not, rigorous or
not. Hume is told that the given is not a group of atoms and that
association cannot explain the singular content of a thought. The
reader should not be surprised to find in the text itself the literal
refutation of all these objections—despite the fact that the objections
come after the text.
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PRINCIPLES OF HUMAN NATURE
In truth, only one kind of objection is worthwhile: the objection
which shows that the question raised by a philosopher is not a good
question, that it does not force the nature of things enough, that it
should be raised in another way, that we should raise it in a better
way, or that we should raise a different question. It is exactly in this
way that a great philosopher objects to another: for example, as we
will see later, this is how Kant criticizes Hume. Certainly, we know
that a philosophical theory involves psychological and, above all,
sociological factors. But again, these factors are relevant only to the
question and to nothing else. They are relevant only to the extent
that they give it a motivation; they do not tell us whether or not it
is a true or a false question. It follows that we cannot raise against
Hume any objections we wish. It is not a matter of saying: he pul-
verized and atomized the given. It is only a matter of knowing
whether the question he raises is the most rigorous possible. Hume
posits the question of the subject and situates it in the following
terms: the subject is constituted inside the given. He presents the con-
ditions of possibilities and the criticism of the question in the fol-
lowing way: relations are external to ideas. As for atomism and asso-
ciationism, these are but the implications developed from this
question. If we want to object, it is this question that we must assess,
and nothing else: really, there is nothing else.
We need not attempt this assessment here; it belongs to philos-
ophy, and not to the history of philosophy. It is sufficient for us to
know that empiricism is definable, that it defines itself only through
the position of a precise problem, and through the presentation of
the conditions of this problem. No other definition is possible. The
classical definition of empiricism proposed by the Kantian tradition
is this: empiricism is the theory according to which knowledge not
only begins with experience but is derived from it. But why would
the empiricist say that? and as the result of which question? This
definition, to be sure, has at least the advantage of avoiding a piece
of nonsense: were empiricism to be presented simply as a theory
according to which knowledge begins only with experience, there
would not have been any philosophy or philosophers—Plato and
Leibniz included—who would not be empiricists. The fact is, though,
that the definition is in no way satisfactory: first of all, because
knowledge is not the most important thing for empiricism, but only
the means to some practical activity. Next, because experience for
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the empiricist, and for Hume in particular, does not have this uni-
vocal and constitutive aspect that we give it. Experience has two
senses, which are rigorously defined by Hume, and in neither of
these senses is it constitutive. According to the first, if we call ‘“‘ex-
perience” a collection of distinct perceptions, we should then rec-
ognize that relations are not derived from experience. They are the
effect of the principles of association, namely of the principles of
human nature, which, within experience, constitute a subject capable
of transcending experience. And if we use the word in the second
sense, in order to denote various conjunctions of past objects, we
should again recognize that principles do not come from experience,
since, on the contrary, experience itself must be understood as a
principle.'
To consider the matter aright, reason is nothing but a won-
derful and intelligible instinct in our souls, which carries us
along a certain train of ideas, and endows them with par-
ticular qualities, according to their particular situations and
relations. This instinct, ’tis true, arises from past observations
and experience; but can any one give the ultimate reason, why
past experience and observations produces such an effect, any more
than why nature alone shou’d produce it? Nature may certainly
produce whatever can arise from habit: Nay, habit is nothing but
one of the principles of nature, and derives all its force from that
origin.?
We see why Hume never showed any interest in the problems of
genesis or in purely psychological problems. Relations are not the
product of a genesis, but rather the effect of principles. Genesis must
refer to the principles, it is merely the particular character of a
principle. Empiricism is not geneticism: as much as any other phi-
losophy, it is opposed to psychologism.
In short, it seems impossible to define empiricism as a theory
according to which knowledge derives from experience. Perhaps the
term “given” is better suited. But the “given” also has two meanings:
the collection of ideas and experience are given; but in this collection
. the subject which transcends experience and the relations which do
not depend on ideas are also given. This means that empiricism will
not be correctly defined except by means of a dualism. Such an
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PRINCIPLES OF HUMAN NATURE
empirical dualism exists between terms and relations, or more exactly
between the causes of perceptions and the causes of relations, be-
tween the hidden powers of nature and the principles of human
nature. Only this dualism, considered under all its possible forms,
can define empiricism and present it in the following fundamental
question: When is the given the product of the powers of nature
and when is the subject the product of the principles of human
nature? “How is the subject constituted inside the given?” A school
can legitimately call itself empiricist only if it develops at least some
form of this duality. Often, modern schools of logic legitimately
call themselves empiricist, because they begin with the duality of
relations and terms. The same duality manifests itself under the most
diverse forms between relations and terms, the subject and the given,
the principles of human nature and the powers of nature. Conse-
quently, the criterion of empiricism becomes evident. We will call
“nonempiricist” every theory according to which, in one way or an-
other, relations are derived from the nature of things.
This relation between nature and human nature, between the
powers that are at the origin of the given and the principles that —
constitute a subject within the given, must be thought of as an accord,
for the accord is a fact. The problem of this accord provides em-
piricism with a real metaphysics, that is, with the problem of pur-
posiveness: what kind of accord is there between the collection of
ideas and the association of ideas, between the rule of nature and
the rule of representations, between the rule of the reproduction of
natural phenomena and the rule of the reproduction of mental rep-
resentations? We say that Kant understood the essence of associa-
tionism, because he understood associationism from the vantage
point of this problem, and he criticized it from the vantage point
of the conditions of this problem. Here is the text in which Kant
admirably develops his critique:
It is a merely empirical law, that representations which have
often followed or accompanied one another finally become
associated, and so are set in a relation whereby, even in the
absence of the object, one of these representations can, in
accordance with a fixed rule, bring about a transition of the
mind to the other. But this law of reproduction presupposes
that appearances are themselves actually subject to such a
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PRINCIPLES OF HUMAN NATURE
rule, and that in the manifold of these representations a
coexistence or sequence takes place in conformity with cer-
tain rules. Otherwise our empirical imagination would never
find opportunity for exercise appropriate to its powers, and
so would remain concealed within the mind as a dead and
to us unknown faculty. If cinnabar were sometimes red,
sometimes black, sometimes light, sometimes heavy .. . my
empirical imagination would never find opportunity when
representing red colour to bring to mind heavy cinnabar.
Nor could there be an empirical synthesis of reproduction,
if a certain name were sometimes given to this, sometimes
to that object, or were one and the same thing named some-
times in one way, sometimes in another, independently of
any rule to which appearances are in themselves subject.
There must then be something which, as the a priori
ground of a necessary synthetic unity of appearances, makes
their reproduction possible. . . . For if we can show that even
our purest a priori intuitions yield no knowledge, save in so
far as they contain a combination of the manifold such as
renders a thoroughgoing synthesis of reproduction possible,
then this synthesis of imagination is likewise grounded, an-
tecedently to all experience, upon a priori principles, and we
must assume a pure transcendental synthesis of imagination
as conditioning the very possibility of all experience. For
experience as such necessarily presupposes the reproducti-
bility of appearances.’
The primary interest of this text is in the fact that it situates the
problem where it should be and in the way it should be, that is, on
the level of the imagination. In fact, empiricism is a philosophy of
the imagination and not a philosophy of the senses. We know that
the question “how does the subject constitute itself within the
given?” means “how does the imagination become a faculty?” Ac-
cording to Hume, the imagination becomes a faculty insofar as a
law of the reproduction of representations or a synthesis of repro-
duction is constituted as the result of principles. Where does Kant’s
critique begin? Kant, of course, does not doubt that the imagination
is effectively the best possible terrain for raising the problem of
knowledge. Of the three syntheses that he distinguishes, he himself
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presents the synthesis of the imagination as the foundation of the
other two. But Kant reproaches Hume for having mistakenly raised
the problem on this good terrain: the very way in which Hume
posed the question, that is, his dualism, necessitated the notion that
the relation between the given and the subject is an agreement be-
tween the subject and the given, of human nature and nature. But
precisely, let us suppose that the given is not initially subject to
principles of the same kind as those that regulate the connection of
representations in the case of an empirical subject. In this case, the
subject could never encounter this agreement, except in an absolutely
accidental way. It would not even have the occasion to connect its
representations according to the rules whose corresponding faculty
it nevertheless possessed.* As far as Kant is concerned, the problem
must be reversed. We must relate the given to the subject, conceive
the agreement as an agreement of the given with the subject, and
of nature with the nature of reasonable beings. Why? Because the
given is not a thing in itself, but rather a set of phenomena, a set
that can be presented as a nature only by means of an a priori synthesis.
The latter renders possible a rule of representations within the em-
pirical imagination only on the condition that it first constitutes a
tule of phenomena within nature itself. Thus, for Kant, relations
depend on the nature of things in the sense that, as phenomena,
things presuppose a synthesis whose source is the same as the source
of relations. This is why criticial philosophy is not an empiricism.
The implications of the problem reversed in this way are as follows:
there is an a priori, that is, we must recognize a productive imagi-
nation and a transcendental activity.> Transcendence is an empirical
fact; the transcendental is what makes transcendence immanent to
something = x.° Another way of saying the same thing is this:
something within thought transcends (dépassera) the imagination without
being able to do without it (s’en passer): the a priori synthesis of the
imagination sends us over to the synthetic unity of apperception
which encompasses it.’
Let us return, then, to the question that Hume raised in the way
he raised it, which we can now better understand: how can it be
developed? According to Hume, and also Kant, the principles of
knowledge are not derived from experience. But in the case of Hume,
nothing within thought surpasses the imagination, nothing is tran-
scendental, because these principles are simply principles of our na-
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PRINCIPLES OF HUMAN NATURE
ture, and because they render possible an experience without at the
same time rendering necessary the objects of this experience. Only
one device will permit Hume to present the agreement between
human nature and nature as something more than an accidental,
indeterminate, and contingent agreement: this device will be
purposiveness.
Purposiveness, that is the agreement of the subject with the given,
with the powers of the given, and with nature, presents itself to us
under so many different expressions, because each of these expres-
sions corresponds to a moment, a step, or a dimension of the subject.
The practical problem of a link between the various moments of
subjectivity must precede the affirmation of purposiveness because
this link conditions it. We must then recapitulate the moments of
the general action of the principles in the mind and, for each one
of these moments, we must seek the unity between the principles
of association and the principles of passion. This unity confers upon
the subject its successive structures. The subject must be compared
to the resonance and to the increasingly louder reverberation of prin-
ciples within the depths of the mind.
Now if we consider the human mind, we shall find, that
with regard to the passions, ’tis not of the nature of a wind-
instrument of music, which in running over all the notes
immediately loses the sound after the breath ceases; but
rather resembles a string-instrument, where after each stroke
the vibrations still retain some sound, which gradually and
insensibly decays.®
What we must bring to light first of all is that the subject, being
the effect of the principles within the mind, is but the mind being
activated. We do not, then, have to ask whether for Hume the subject
is active or passive, for this is a false alternative. If we did embrace
it, we would have to insist on the passivity rather than the activity
of the subject, since the latter is the effect of principles. The subject
is the mind activated by principles, and the notion of activation avoids
the alternative. To the extent that principles sink their effect into
the depths of the mind, the subject, which is this very effect, becomes
more and more active and less and less passive. It was passive in the
.
PRINCIPLES OF HUMAN NATURE
beginning, it is active in the end. This confirms the idea that sub-
jectivity is in fact a process, and that an inventory must be made of
the diverse moments of this process. To speak like Bergson, let us
say that the subject is an imprint, or an impression, left by principles,
that it progressively turns into a machine capable of using this
impression.
We must start from the pure impression and begin with principles.
Principles, Hume says, act inside the mind. But what is their action?
The answer is unambiguous: the effect of the principle is always an
impression of reflection. Subjectivity is then an impression of re-
flection and nothing else. However, when Hume defines the impres-
sion of reflection, he tells us that it proceeds from certain impressions
of sensation.? But it is precisely this proceeding or this process that
the impressions of sensation are incapable of explaining: they cannot
even explain why, in the collection, they themselves are elected among others
and instead of others. “Certain” impressions of sensation are called
upon to be that from which impressions of reflection proceed—but
what is it that does the calling? For example, for contiguous or
similar impressions to be elected, resemblance and contiguity must
already be principles. For impressions of reflection to proceed from
certain impressions of sensation, the mind must possess faculties con-
stituted in an appropriate way; there must be a constitution which
does not depend upon the mind—a nature.'° Thus, the principle
inserts itself between the mind and the subject, between some impres-
sions of sensation and the impressions of reflection, making the latter
proceed from the former. It is the rule of the process, the constitutive
element of the constitution of the subject within the mind, the
principle of its nature. We can in fact see that there are two ways
of defining the principle: within the collection, the principle elects,
chooses, designates, and invites certain impressions of sensation
among others; having done this, it constitutes impressions of reflec-
tion in connection with these elected impressions. Thus, it has two ,
roles at the same time: a selective role and a constitutive role. Ac-
cording to the first role, the principles of passion are those that choose
the impressions of pleasure and pain."! The principles of association,
on the other hand, choose the perceptions that must be brought
together into a composite.'? As they determine the process of the
impressions of reflection, the principles do not develop the virtual-
ities that would have been present in the impressions of sensation;
\
(i)
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PRINCIPLES OF HUMAN NATURE
in fact, the latter do not contain any virtualities. The principles
themselves produce and bring about the impressions of reflection;
however, they bring them about in a way that causes them to begin
relations with certain impressions of sensation.
Thus, the role of principles in general is both to designate impres-
sions of sensation and, based upon them, to produce an impression
of reflection. What is the list of principles? Being the laws of human
nature and making possible a science of man, they are inevitably few
in number.'? In any case, we do not have to justify their exact number
or their particular nature. Even Kant did not explain in more detail
the number and the kind of categories. In a word, their list presents
us with a fact. Let us begin then with the principles of association.
Hume distinguishes three: contiguity, resemblance, and. causality.
Association has, first of all, three effects: general ideas, substances,
and natural relations. In these three cases, the effect is an impression
of reflection, a passion, a calm passion, or a determination undergone
by the mind—in other words, what Hume calls a tendency, custom,
freedom, or disposition. The principle constitutes this impression of
reflection, in the mind, as an impression derived from impressions
of sensation. This is indeed the case with general ideas: the principle
of resemblance designates certain ideas that are similar, and makes
it possible to group them together under the same name. Based on
this name and in conjunction with a certain idea taken from the
group—for example, a particular idea awakened by the name—the
principle produces a habit, a strength, and a power to evoke any
other particular idea of the same group; it produces an impression
of reflection." In the case of substances, the principles of contiguity
and causality again group together certain ideas. If we discover a
new idea which is, by these same principles, linked to the preceding
ones, we are determined to understand it within the group, as though
it had been a part of it all along.’ Lastly, in the case of natural
relations, each one of the three principles designates some ideas and
produces an easy transition from one to another.
It is true that it is often more difficult to understand the action
of the principles. First of all, the principles have other effects, which
we have not yet studied, doubling up the preceding ones. These are
abstract ideas, philosophical modes and relations. Of course, in the
case of abstract ideas the difficulty is not great, because the only
difference between abstract and general ideas is that in the case of
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PRINCIPLES OF HUMAN NATURE
the former two resemblances intervene and are distinctly appre-
hended.'* The problem is rather with philosophical modes and re-
lations. And philosophical relations are to natural relations what
modes are to substances. Everything happens, then, as though the
ptinciples of association were abandoning their primary, selective role,
and as though something other than these principles assumed this
role and was designating and choosing the appropriate impressions
of sensation. This something other is affectivity and circumstance.
Thus, philosophical relations are different from natural relations,
precisely because they are formed outside the limits of natural se-
lection. As for the impression of reflection, it comes from ideas that
are arbitrarily connected within the imagination; we do not find it
appropriate to compare these ideas, but only in virtue of a particular
circumstance.'? Similarly, in the case of modes, the impressions of
sensations, that is, the ideas from which the impression of reflection
proceeds, are no longer tied together by means of contiguity and
causality; they are “dispers’d in different subjects.” Or, at least, con-
tiguity and causality are no longer considered as “the foundation of
the complex idea.” ‘“‘The idea of a dance is an instance of the first
kind of modes; that of beauty of the second.’’!8 In brief, we can see
that the principle of association reduces itself to its second, constitutive
role, while circumstance or affectivity holds now the first role.
Finally, we must make a special place for causality. Hume thinks .
that belief depends on the two principles of experience and habit.1?
But what are these two doing on the list? To understand this, we
must remember that the effect of the principle of causality is not
only a relation but is rather an inference according to that relation.
Causality is the only relation for which there is inference. Paradox-
ically, what we must call here natural relation is the inference ac-
cording to the relation. This is why Hume says that, in studying
inference before explaining the relation, we are in appearance only
reversing the normal order.”” But if it is true that the nature of
relations, as natural relations, depends on the nature of inference, it
is still the case that the inference is according to relations; in other
words, natural relations in one sense presuppose philosophical re-
lations: it is as a consequence of their constant conjunction within
experience that objects are necessarily connected in the imagina-
tion.2! The particular situation of causality suffices to convince us
that, under this category, natural and philosophical relations are not
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PRINCIPLES OF HUMAN NATURE
so easily distributed as they were in the previous case. In effect,
everything now happens as though each of the two roles of the
principle was embodied in a different principle. The principle of
experience is selective: it presents or designates a “repetition of like
objects in like relations of succession and contiguity. . . .”?
This is what causality is as a philosophical relation: the effect of
experience is not even an impression of reflection, since the principle
is purely selective. On the contrary, the principle of habit is con-
stitutive, but only at a later stage: being an effect, it has a natural
relation or an impression of reflection which is anticipation and
belief. As we go from relation to inference, from philosophical re-
lations to natural relations, we switch levels. We must, in a certain
sense, start from zero, if only to recover on this other level all the
results, albeit enriched, that we have already obtained.?? Causality
will always be defined in two combined ways, “either as a philosophic
or as a natural relation; either as a comparison of two ideas, or as an
association betwixt them.”?#
Now the entire difficulty is this: since the two aspects of the
principle are embodied in two distinct principles, the second aspect
always follows the first, without however depending on it. As a
matter of fact, habit can create for itself an equivalent experience;
it can invoke fictional repetitions that render it independent of reality.
Be that as it may, the role of the principles of association is to
constitute an impression of reflection, on the basis of designated
impressions of sensation. The role of the principles of passion is the same.
The difference between them is that in the second case the chosen
impressions are pleasures and pains; but from the point of view of
pleasures and pains, the principle still acts as a “‘natural impulse” or
as an “instinct”? producing an impression of reflection. However, a
new exception must not go unnoticed: there are passions born of
their principles, without these principles causing them to go through
preliminary pleasures and pains. Such is the case of properly phys-
iological needs, as for example, hunger, thirst, and sexual desire:
“These passions, properly speaking, produce good and evil, and pro-
ceed not from them, like the other affections.’
Having said this, Hume goes on to distinguish two kinds of pas-
sions: “By direct passions I understand such as arise immediately
from good or evil, from pain or pleasure. By indirect such as proceed
from the same principles, but by the conjunction of other qualities.’”*
In this sense, any passion always has a cause, in an idea that excites
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PRINCIPLES OF HUMAN NATURE
it, an impression from which it proceeds, or in pleasures or pains
that are distinct from the passion itself. Of whatever kind, the passions
always exist in an impression of reflection or in a particular emotion,
whether agreeable or disagreeable, the emotion stems from a distinct
pain or a distinct pleasure. But, from here on, we are faced with two
cases, two kinds of impressions of reflection or two kinds of emotion:
those who turn the mind toward good or evil and toward the pleasure
or the pain from which they proceed; and those others who turn
the mind toward the idea of an object they themselves produce.”
These are two different kinds of principles and two different kinds
of impressions of reflection. Sometimes the principle of the passions
is a “primitive instinct” by means of which a mind that has expe-
rienced emotion tends to obtain the good and to avoid evil;?* or at
other times, the principle is a natural organization assigning to an
emotion a certain idea, “which (the emotion) never fails to pro-
duce.’”?? That is how direct and indirect passions are distinguished
from each other. There are as many direct passions as there are modes
of good and evil giving rise to passions: when good and evil are
certain, we have joy or sadness; when they are uncertain, we have
hope or fear; when they are merely entertained, we have desire and
aversion; when they depend on us, we have the will.*° We distinguish
as many indirect passions as there are emotions producing the idea
of an object. But among them, two pairs are indeed fundamental:
pride and humility, occurring when agreeable or disagreeable emo-
tions produce an idea of the self; love and hate, occurring when the
same emotions produce the idea of another person.
Why are the last mentioned passions called “indirect”? It is be-
cause, insofar as the impression of reflection produces an idea, the
impression of sensation giving rise to it must be born of an object
linked to this idea. For there to be pride, the pleasure giving rise to
the passion must find its source in an object connected with us.
tis the beauty or deformity of our person, houses, equipage,
or furniture, by which we are render’d either vain or humble.
The same qualities, when transfer’d to subjects, which bear
us no relation, influence not in the smallest degree either of
these affections.”!
‘Tn this sense, indirect passions proceed from good and evil, “but in
: : : ane . he
conjunction with other qualities”: a relation of an idea must be added
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PRINCIPLES OF HUMAN NATURE
to the relation of impressions. In pride, “[t]he quality, which operates
on the passion, produces separately an impression of resembling it;
the subject, to which the quality adheres, is related to self, the object
of the passion.”?? The principles of indirect passions can produce
their effect only when assisted by the principles of association, at
least by contiguity and causality.2* No doubt, direct and indirect
passions do not exclude one another; on the contrary, their respective
principles are combined:
But supposing that there is an immediate impression of pain
or pleasure, and that arising from an object related to our-
selves or others, this does not prevent the propensity or aver-
sion, with the consequent emotions, but by concurring with
certain dormant principles of the human mind, excites the
new impressions of pride and humility, love or hatred. That
propensity, which unites us to the object, or separates us
from it, still continues to operate, but in conjunction with
the indirect passions, which arise from a double relation of
impressions and ideas.%
The immediate originality of Hume’s theory is in the presentation
of the differences between direct and indirect passions as a duality,
and in the making of this duality into a method for the study of
passions in general, instead of understanding or engendering the ones
on the basis of the others. Hume’s theory of the passions is original
because it does not present the passions as a primary movement or
as a primary force to be followed by the philosopher, more geometrico,
in its increasing complexity as other factors intervene (the repre-
sentation of the object, the imagination, the competition between
men, etc.). Hume presented the passions as a process that in itself is
simple, although the philosopher, like a physicist, considers it com-
posite and made up of two distinct parts. We are not faced with a
logical or mathematical deduction of the passions, but rather with
a physical decomposition of them and of the passional movement.
But is it not the case that the understanding and the passions are
themselves the products of a decomposition and of the division of
an already simple movement?
Human nature being compos’d of two principal parts, which
are requisite in all its actions, the affections and understand-
fis
PRINCIPLES OF HUMAN NATURE
ing; tis certain, that the blind motions of the former, with-
out the direction of the latter, incapacitate men for society:
And it may be allow’d us to consider separately the effects,
that result from the separate operations of these two com-
ponent parts of the mind. The same liberty may be permitted
to moral, which is allow’d to natural philosophers; and ’tis
very usual with the latter to consider any motion as com-
pounded and consisting of two parts separate from each
other, tho’ at the same time they acknowledge it to be in
itself uncompounded and inseparable.*
Hume’s entire philosophy (in fact, empiricism in general) is a
kind of “physicalism.” As a matter of fact, one must find a fully
physical usage for principles whose nature is only physical. As Kant
observes, principles in Hume’s text have an exclusively physical and
empirical nature. We did not mean anything else when we defined
the empirical problem in opposition to a transcendental deduction
and also to a psychological genesis. The question of empiricism,
“how does the subject constitute itself within the given?”, suggests
that we distinguish two things: on one hand, that the necessary
recourse to principles for the understanding of subjectivity is af-
firmed; but on the other, that the agreement between principles and
the given within which the principles constitute the subject is given
up. The principles of experience are not principles for the objects
of experience, they do not guarantee the reproduction of objects
within experience. Obviously, such a situation is possible for prin-
ciples only if one finds an equally physical usage for them—one that
would be necessary in virtue of the question raised. Now, this phys-
ical usage is well determined. Human nature is the transformed
mind. But this transformation will be apprehended as indivisible in
relation to the mind that undergoes it, because in this case the mind
functions as a whole. On the contrary, the same transformation will
be apprehended as subject to fragmentation in relation to the prin-
ciples that produce it as their effect. Finally, we can present the
complement of this idea: the subject is indeed the activated mind;
but this activation will be apprehended as the mind’s passivity in
relation to the principles producing it, and as an activity in relation
to the mind that undergoes it.
Thus, the subject is decomposed into as many imprints as there
are imprints left in the mind by the principles. The subject is de-
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PRINCIPLES OF HUMAN NATURE
composed into impressions of reflection, that is, into the impressions
left by the principles. It is still the case, however, that, in relation
to the mind whose transformation is brought about by the joint
operation of the principles, the subject itself is indivisible, nonfrag-
mentable, active, and global. Therefore, in order to reconcile the
two points of view, it is not enough to say that the principles have
parallel actions; it is not enough to show that they have a common
characteristic, that is, the constitution of an impression of reflection
based on impressions of sensation. Nor is it enough to show that
they implicate one another and that they mutually presuppose one
another under different aspects. Each one must be finally and ab-
solutely subordinated to the others. The elements resulting from the
decomposition cannot have the same value: there is always a right
side and a left side. On this point, we know Hume’s reply: the
relations find their direction and their sense in the passion; association
presupposes projects, goals, intentions, occasions, an entire practical
life and affectivity. Given particular circumstances and the needs of the
moment, the passions are capable of replacing the principles of association
in their primary role, and of assuming their selective role. They are capable
because the principles do not select impressions of sensation without having
already been submitted by themselves to the necessities of practical life, and
to the most general and most constant needs. In brief, the principles of
the passions are absolutely primary. Between association and the
passions we find the same relation that we also find between the
possible and the real, once we admit that the real precedes the pos-
sible. Association gives the subject a possible structure, but only the
passions can give it being and existence. In its relation to the passions,
the association finds its sense and its destiny. We should not forget
that, in Hume, literally, belief is for the sake of sympathy, and caus-
ality, for the sake of property. Hume often talks about a critique of
relations; he presents in fact a theory of the understanding as a
critique of relations. Actually, it is not the relation which is subject to
the critique, but rather representation. Hume shows that representation can-
not be a criterion for the relations. Relations are not the object of a repre-
sentation, but the means of an activity. The same critique, which takes
the relation away from representation, gives it back to practice. What
is denounced and criticized is the idea that the subject can be a
knowing subject. Associationism exists for the sake of utilitarianism.
Association does not define a knowing subject; on the contrary, it
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PRINCIPLES OF HUMAN NATURE
defines a set of possible means for a practical subject for which all
real ends belong to the moral, passional, political, and economic
order. Thus, this subordination of association to the passions already
manifests within human nature a kind of secondary purposiveness,
which prepares us for the problem of the primary purposiveness,
that is, for the problem of the agreement between human nature
and nature.
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CONCLUSION
PURPOSIVENESS
PRINCIPLES ACCORDING To their nature fix the mind in two very
different ways. The principles of association establish natural rela-
tions among ideas forming inside the mind an entire network similar
to a system of channels. No longer do we move accidentally from
one idea to another. One idea naturally introduces another on the
basis of a principle; ideas naturally follow one another. In short,
under the influence of association, imagination becomes reason and
the fancy finds constancy. We have seen all of this. Hume, however,
makes an important remark: were the mind fixed in this way only,
there will never be, nor could there ever have been, morality. This
is the first argument which shows that morality does not stem from
reason. One must not confuse, in effect, relation and direction. Re-
lations establish a movement between ideas, but this is a to-and-fro
movement, such that an idea leads to another only insofar as the
latter rightfully leads back to the first: the movement occurs in both
directions. Being external to their terms, how would relations be
able to determine the priority of one term over the other, or the
subordination of one to the other? But it is obvious that action does
not tolerate such an equivocation: it needs a starting point, an origin,
something which would also be its end, or something beyond which
we need not go. Relations, by themselves, would suffice to make the
action cternally possible, but they cannot ace ‘ount for the actual per-
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CONCLUSION: PURPOSIVENESS
formance of the action. There is action only through sense or di-
rection (sens), and morality is like action. In its resemblance to action,
morality circumvenes relations. Is it morally the same to be mean
to someone who was good to me and nice to someone who wronged
me?! To recognize that it is not the same thing, despite the fact that
the relation of contrariety is the same, is to recognize a radical dif-
ference between morality and reason. One could, of course, say that
among relations causality already contains within its own synthesis
of time a principle of irreversibility. Undoubtedly this is true, and
causality is indeed privileged among all relations; but the real ques-
tion is to know which effect interests me and makes me seck out its
cause. “It can never in the least concern us to know, that such objects
are causes, and such others effects, if both the causes and effects be
indifferent to us.’”
The mind, therefore, must be determined in some other way. The
principles of the passions should designate certain impressions, ren-
dering them the ends of our activity. Literally, it is no longer a
matter of placing bounds around the mind or of tying it up, but
rather of nailing it down. It is no longer a matter of fixed relations,
but of centers of fixation. Within the mind, there are impressions
which we call pleasures and pains. But that pleasure is good and
pain bad, that we tend toward pleasure and push away pain—these
facts do not inhere in pain and pleasure themselves; this is why the
principles belong here. This is the primary fact beyond which we
need not go: “If you push your inquiries further and desire a reason
why he hates pain, it is impossible he can ever give any. This is an
ultimate end, and is never referred to any other object.”?
By making pleasure into an end, the principles of the passions
give action its principle, making thereby the prospect of pleasure a
motive for the action.* We find thus the link between action and
relation. The essence of action is found in the nexus between means
and end. To act is to assemble means in order to realize an end. To
acct is to assemble means in order to realize an end. But this nexus
is very different from a relation. Undoubtedly, it includes the causal
relation, since all means are causes, and all ends, effects. Causality
enjoys a considerable privilege over other relations.
A merchant is desirous of knowing the sum total of his
accounts with any person: Why? but that he may learn what
CONCLUSION: PURPOSIVENESS
sum will have the same effects in paying his debt, and going
to market, as all the particular articles taken together. Ab-
stract or demonstrative reasoning, therefore, never influences
any of our actions, but only as it directs our judgment con-
cerning causes and effects.5
But for a cause to be considered as a means, the effect which it
brings about must interest us, that is, the idea of the effect must first
of all be posited as an end for our action. The means exceeds the
cause: the effect must be thought of as a good, the subject who
projects it must have a tendency to achieve it. The relation of means
to end is not merely causal; it is rather a kind of utility. The useful
is defined by its appropriation or by its disposition “to promote a
good.” A cause is a means only for a subject that tends to achieve
the effect of this cause.
Now, what are these subjective tendencies of achieving and pro-
moting goods? They are the effects of the principles of affectivity,
impressions of reflection and of the passions. Similarly, the useful is
not only a cause considered in its relation to an effect that we posit
as something good. It is also a tendency to promote that good or a
quality considered in relation to the circumstances that agree with
it. For there are two ways to understand human qualities, such as
anger, prudence, audacity, discretion, etc.: generically, as possible
universal responses to given circumstances; and differentially, as
given character traits which may or may not agree with possible
circumstances.’ It is from the latter point of view that character traits
are useful or harmful.
The best character, indeed, were it not rather too perfect
for human nature, is that which is not swayed by temper of
any kind, but alternately employs enterprise and caution, as
each is useful to the particular purpose intended. . . . Fabius,
says Machiavelli, was cautious; Scipio enterprising; and both
succeeded because the situation of the Roman affairs, during
the command of each, was peculiarly adapted to his genius,
but both would have failed had these situations been re-
versed. He is happy whose circumstances suit his temper;
but he is more excellent who can suit his temper to any
circumstances.’
%
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CONCLUSION: PURPOSIVENESS
The utility, which designates the relation between means and
end, also designates the relation between individuality and the his-
torical situation. Utilitarianism is as much an evaluation of historical
acts as it is a theory of instrumental action. We do not call things
only “useful,” but also passions, feelings, and characters. Indeed, our
moral judgment is not brought to bear on the utility of things, but,
in a way that must be specified, on the utility of characters. And
this is the second argument for the fact that morality as a guide to
action is not attached to reason. Reason has indeed a double role. It
helps us to know causes and effects, and it tells us also whether or
not “we chuse means insufficient for the design’d end”; but even so,
an end has to be projected.’ Again, it is reason that permits us to
know and to untangle the circumstances; but the feeling produced
in virtue of the totality of circumstances depends on a “‘natural con-
stitution of the mind.” “[I]t is requisite a sentiment should here display
itself in order to give a preference to the useful above the pernicious
tendencies.”’!°
It is not by accident that morality has a right to speak on precisely
those subjects with respect to which reason remains silent. How does
it speak? What kind of discourse does it maintain about ends and
characters? We do not know yet, but at least we do know this:
Reason, being cool and disengaged, is no motive to action,
and directs only the impulse received from appetite or in-
clination by showing us the means of attaining happiness
and avoiding misery. Taste, as it gives pleasure or pain, and
thereby constitutes happiness or misery, becomes a motive
to action and is the first spring or impulse to desire and
volition,"
Our first conclusion must then be that the combined principles
make the mind itself into a subject and the fancy into a human
nature. They establish a subject within the given, because a mind
equipped with ends and relations—with relations responding to those
ends—is a subject. There is, however, still a difficulty: the subject is
constituted with the help of principles inside the given, but it is
constituted as an entity that goes beyond that given. The subject is
the effect of principles in the mind, but it is the mind that becomes
(26
CONCLUSION: PURPOSIVENESS
subject; it is the mind that, in the last analysis, transcends itself. In
short, we must realize both that the subject is constituted by means of
principles and that it is grounded in the fancy. Hume says so himself
in relation to knowledge: memory, the senses, and understanding
are all grounded in the imagination.
But what does the mind do after becoming subject? It “advises
certain ideas rather than others.” “To transcend” means exactly this.
The mind is animated when the principles fix it, as they establish
relations between ideas; it is animated when they activate it, in the
sense that they give to the vividness of impressions certain laws of
communication, distribution, and allotment. In fact, a relation between
two ideas is also the quality by means of which an impression communicates
to that idea something of its vividness.!2 The fact is that vividness is not
in itself a product of principles; being a characteristic of impressions,
it is the property and the fact of fancy—its irreducible and immediate
datum, to the extent that it is the origin of the mind.
Within the domain of knowledge, then, we seek a formula for
the activity of the mind having become subject, that is, a formula
that would agree with all the effects of association. For Hume, the
formula is this: to transcend is always to move from the known to
the unknown.’* We call this operation the schematism of the mind
(general rules) and we know that it is the essence of this schematism
to be extensive. All knowledge is indeed a system of relations be-
tween parts, such that we can determine one part by reference to
another. One of Hume’s most important ideas—one that he will use
particularly against the possibility of any cosmology or theology—
is that there is no intensive knowledge; all possible knowledge is
extensive and between parts. This extensive schematism, however,
has two characteristics which correspond to the two kinds of rela-
tions: matters of fact and relations among ideas. Hume suggests that,
in knowledge, either we move from known to unknown circum-
stances, or we proceed from known to unknown relations. Here we
find a distinction, dear to Hume, between proof and certainty. The
first operation, that of proof or probability, develops under the action
of principles a schematism of the cause (which we have sufficiently
examined in the preceding chapters); but how is the schematism of
the second operation formed? The first is essentially physical, the
second, essentially mathematical. “A speculative reasoner concerning
‘triangles or circles considers the several known and given relations
127
CONCLUSION: PURPOSIVENESS
of the parts of these figures, and thence infers some unknown relation
which is dependent on the former.”'*
This second schematism seems to relate not to causes but to gen-
eral ideas. The function of general ideas is not so much to be ideas
but rather to be the rule for the production of the ideas that we
need.'5 In the case of causality, we produce an object as an object
of belief by means of another particular object and in conformity
with the rules of observation. The mathematical function of general
ideas is different: it consists in producing an idea as an object of
certainty, by means of another idea which is apprehended as a rule
of construction.
[W]hen we mention any great number, such as a thousand,
the mind has generally no adequate idea of it, but only a
power of producing such an idea, by its adequate idea of the
decimals, under which the number is comprehended.'*
However, this schematism of knowledge in general, under these
two aspects, is extensive not only in the sense that it goes from one
part to another but is also extensive in the sense that it is excessive.
Vividness, in fact, is not the product of principles; impressions of
sensations are the product of principles; impressions of sensations are
the origin of the mind and the property of the fancy. As soon as
relations are established, these impressions tend to communicate their
vividness to all ideas tied to them.'? In Hume’s empiricism, this
resembles somehow the possibles, which in the case of rationalism
tend with all their might toward Being. The fact is, though, that
not all relations are equivalent: from the point of view of human
nature, we know that not all relations have the same effect “in rein-
forcing and making our ideas vivid,” and that any legitimate belief
must necessarily pass through causality. Undoubtedly, any relation
between two ideas is also the quality by means of which the impres-
sion enlivens the idea to which it is linked; but it is also necessary
that the idea be linked in a firm, constant, and invariable way.'®
Moreover, impressions do not merely necessitate relations; they also
feign and fabricate relations in the course of encounters. The subject,
then, is here subject to pressures, being tormented by mirages and
solicited by fancy. Its passions and dispositions of the moment lead
it to second these fictions. In a word, we are not only a subject, we
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CONCLUSION: PURPOSIVENESS
are something else as well; we are also a self, which is always a slave
to its origin. The fact is that there exist illegitimate beliefs and absurd
general ideas. The principles establish relations between ideas, and
these relations are also, in the case of impressions, the rules for the
communication of their vividness. It is still necessary, however, that
vividness conforms without exception to these rules. This is why,
within the schematism of knowledge, there are always excessive rules
waiting to be corrected by other rules: the schematism of the cause
must conform to experience, and the schematism of general ideas
must conform to space, both in geometrical structure and arith-
metical unit—in other words, in the two aspects that define space.19
An entire polemic between the subject and the fancy is thus carried
out inside the self, or rather inside the subject itself. An entire po-
lemic is carried out between the principles of human nature and the
vividness of the imagination, or between principles and fictions. We
know how, for every object of knowledge, the fiction can effectively
be corrected, even if it were to be reborn with the next object. But
we also know how, in the case of the world in general within which
all objects become known, fiction takes over the principles and bends
them radically to its own service.
Let us examine now the activity of the mind in the case of the
passions. The principles of the passions fix the mind by giving it
ends; they also activate it because the prospects of these ends are at
the same time motives and dispositions to act, inclinations, and par-
ticular interests. In short, they bring about a “natural constitution”
to our mind and an entire play of the passions. Within the mind,
the principles constitute affections, giving them ‘“‘a proper limited ob-
ject.”° However, this object is always caught within a system of
circumstances and relations. It is precisely here that we find the
fundamental difference between knowledge and the passions: in the
case of the passions, at least by right, all relations and all circum-
stances are already given. Agrippina is Nero’s mother.
But when Nero killed Agrippina, all the relations between
himself and the person, and all the circumstances of the fact,
were previously known to him; but the motive of revenge
or fear or interest prevailed in his savage heart. . . .?!
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CONCLUSION: PURPOSIVENESS
Thus, the natural constitution of the mind under the influence
of the principles of the passions does not only involve the movement
of an affection seeking out its object, it also involves the reaction of
a mind responding to the supposedly known totality of circumstances
and relations. In other words, our inclinations form general views
upon their objects. They are not led by particular connections only,
or by the attraction of a pleasure which happens to be present.” We
find thus in the case of the passions, as much as in the case of
knowledge albeit in a different way, an ineluctable datum of the
fancy. The affection, which seeks out its object, forms general views
upon this very object, because both are reflected in the imagination
and the fancy. The principles of the passions fix the mind only if,
within the mind, the passions resonate, extend themselves, and suc-
ceed in being reflected. The reaction of the mind to the set of cir-
cumstances and the reflection of the passions in the mind are one
and the same; the reaction is productive, and the reflection is called
“invention.”
It is wisely ordained by nature that private connections
should commonly prevail over universal views and consid-
erations, otherwise our affections and actions would be dis-
sipated and lost for want of a proper limited object ... but
still we know here, as in all the senses, to correct these
inequalities by reflection, and retain a general standard of
vice and virtue, founded chiefly on general usefulness.”
General interest is thus invented: it is the resonance within the
imagination of the particular interest and the movement of a passion
that transcends its own partiality. General interest exists only by
means of the imagination, artifice, or the fancy; nonetheless, it enters
the natural constitution of the mind as a feeling for humanity or as
culture. It is in fact the reaction of the mind to the totality of cir-
cumstances and relations. It provides action with a rule and it is in
the name of this rule that it can be pronounced good or bad in general.
We may consequently condemn Nero. Thus, the activity of the mind
is grounded, in the case of the passions as well as in the case of
knowledge, in the fancy. A moral schematism therefore exists. But
the difference between schematisms does not disappear: the moral
schematism is no longer an extensive schematism; it is an intensive
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CONCLUSION: PURPOSIVENESS
one. The activity of the mind no longer consists in going from one
part to another, from known to unknown relations, or from known
to unknown circumstances. The activity of the mind consists now
in reacting to the supposed totality of known circumstances and
relations.
From circumstances and relations, known or supposed, the
former leads us to the discovery of the concealed and un-
known. After all circumstances and relations are laid before
us, the latter makes us feel from the whole a new sentiment
of blame or approbation.”*
The circle as an object of knowledge is a relation of parts; it is
the locus of points situated at an equal distance from a common point
called a “center.” For example, as an object of aesthetic feeling, this
figure is taken as a whole to which the mind reacts according to its
natural constitution.2> We recall Hume’s text on knowledge, ac-
cording to which the rules of the understanding are in the last
analysis grounded in the imagination. To this text, another text now
corresponds, according to which the rules of the passions are also,
albeit in the last analysis, grounded in the imagination.”® In both
cases, the fancy finds itself at the foundation of a world, that is, of
the world of culture and the world of distinct and continuous ex-
istence. We know that, in the schematisms of morality and knowl-
edge, we find both excessive and corrective rules. But these two
kinds of rules do not have with respect to each other the same kind
of relation in knowledge and in morality. The excessive rules of
knowledge openly contradict the principles of association; to correct
them amounts to denouncing their fiction. A distinct and continuous
world is, from the point of view of the principles, the general residue
of this fiction, being situated at a level that makes it impossible to
be corrected. As for the excessive moral rules, they undoubtedly
constrain the passions; they also sketch out a wholly fictitious world.
But this world conforms to the principles of the passions, frustrating
only the limiting character of their effect. Fiction integrates into a
whole all those passions that excluded each other because they rep-
resented particular interests. It establishes therefore (along with the
general interest) an adequation of the passions to their principles, of
effects taken together to their cause, and of an equality between the
(41
CONCLUSION: PURPOSIVENESS
effect of the principles and the principles themselves. Consequently,
a harmony is established between fiction and the principles of the
passions. This is why the problem of the relation between the prin-
ciples of human nature in general and the fancy can be understood
and resolved only from the particular perspective of the relation
between principles themselves. In the case of knowledge, we must
believe in accordance with causality, but also believe in distinct and
continuous existence; human nature does not allow us to choose
between the two, despite the fact that the two are contradictory
from the point of view of the principles of association. This is because
these principles themselves do not contain the secret of human na-
ture. And this is to say, once again, that the association is for the sake
of the passions. The principles of human nature act separately within
the mind; nevertheless they constitute a subject that functions as a
whole. Abstract ideas are subjected to the needs of the subject,
whereas relations are subjected to its ends. We call “intentional pur-
posiveness” the unity of a subject that functions as a whole. To try
to understand associationism as a psychology of knowledge is to lose
its meaning. The fact is that associationism is the theory of all that
is practice, action, morality, and law.
We have tried to show how the two aspects of the subject are
actually one and the same: the subject is the product of principles
within the mind, but it is also the mind that transcends itself. The
mind becomes subject by means of its principles, so that the subject
is at once constituted by the principles and grounded in the fancy.
How so? In itself, the mind is not subject: it is a given collection of
impressions and separate ideas. Impressions are defined by their viv-
idness, and ideas, as reproductions of impressions. This means that,
in itself, the mind has two fundamental characteristics: resonance and
vividness. Recall the metaphor that likens the mind to a percussion
instrument. When does it become subject? It becomes subject when
its vividness is mobilized in such a way that the part characterized by
vividness (impression) communicates it to another part (idea), and also,
when all the parts taken together resonate in the act of producing something
new. Belief and invention are the two modes of transcendence and
we can see their relation to the original characteristics of the mind.
These two modes present themselves as the modifications of the mind
caused by the principles, or as the effects of the principles within
the mind: principles of association and principles of passion.
We should not ask what principles, are, but rather what they do.
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CONCLUSION: PURPOSIVENESS
They are not entities; they are functions. They are defined by their
effects. These effects amount to this: the principles constitute, within
the given, a subject that invents and believes. In this sense, the prin-
ciples are principles of human nature. To believe is to anticipate. To
communicate to an idea the vividness of the impression to which it
is attached is to anticipate; it is to transcend memory and the senses.
For this purpose, there must already be relations between ideas: it
must be the case, for example, that heat and fire are conjoined. And
this does not imply only the given but also the action of principles,
experience as a principle, resemblance, and contiguity. And that is
not all; it must be the case that in seeing fire at a distance we believe
that there is heat—and this implies habit. The fact is that the given
will never justify relations between its separate parts—not even in
similar cases—nor would it justify the transition from one part to
another.
May I not clearly and distinctly conceive that a body, falling
from the clouds, and which, in all other respects, resembles
snow, has yet the taste of salt or feeling of fire? Is there any
more intelligible proposition than to affirm, that all the trees
will flourish in December . . . 227
oe
Not only does the subject anticipate, but it conserves itself,?* that
is, it reacts, whether by instinct or by invention, to every part of the
given. Here again, the fact is that the given never joins together its
separate elements into a whole. In short, as we believe and invent,
we turn the given itself into a nature. At this point Hume’s philos-
ophy reaches its ultimate point: Nature conforms to being. Human
nature conforms to nature—but in what sense? Inside the given, we
establish relations and we form totalities. But the latter do not depend
on the given, but rather on the principles we know; they are purely
functional. And the functions agree with the hidden powers on
which the given depends, although we do not know these powers.
We call “purposiveness” this agreement between intentional finality
and nature. This agreement can only be thought; and it is undoubt-
edly the weakest and emptiest of thoughts. Philosophy must con-
stitute itself as the theory of what we are doing, not as a theory of
what there is. What we do has its principles; and being can only be
grasped as the object of a synthetic relation with the very principles
of what we do.
uss
NOTES
Translator’s Introduction: Deleuze, Empiricism, and the
Struggle for Subjectivity
1. See G. Deleuze, Le Bergsonisme (Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France, 1966); Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, trs., Bergsonism
(New York: Zone Books, 1988).
2. See G. Deleuze, Martin Joughin, tr., Expressionism in Philosophy:
Spinoza (New York: Zone Books, 1990); see also G. Deleuze, Le Pli: Lene
et le Baroque (Paris: Minuit, 1988).
3. Lecercle, Philosophy Through the Looking-Glass: Language, Nonsense,
Desire (London: Hutchinson, 1985).
4. For an updated, yet not exhaustive, list of Deleuze’s publications,
see Ronald Bogue, Deleuze and Guattari (New York: Routledge, 1989), 180-
185, 186-187. See Magazine Littéraire, September 1988, no. 257, 64-65; and
Substance, 44/45 (1984).
5. See Histoire de la philosophie (Paris: Hachette, 1972-73), 4:65-78.
This collective work has been reedited in Marabout Université, under the title
La Philosophie, F. Chatelet et al., eds. (Verviers: Marabout, 1979), vol. 2:226-
239.
6. See, for example, “Lettre 4 Michel Cressole,” in M. Cressole, Deleuze
(Paris: Editions Universitaires, 1973), p. 110, and G. Deleuze, Claire Parnet,
Dialogues, Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, trs. (New York: Co-
lumbia University Press, 1987), pp. 14-15; 54-59. See also “Signes et evéne-
ments,” interview with R. Bellour and F. Ewald, Magazine Littéraire, Sep-
tember 1988, no. 257, p. 16.
7. See G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, B. Massumi, tr. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1987), pp. 233-309.
8. See infra, 98--101.
TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION
9. On “minoritarian discourse,” see especially A Thousand Plateaus:
Capitalism and Schizophrenia, pp. 100-110; see also G. Deleuze and F. Guat-
tari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, Dana Polan, tr. (Minneapolis: Uni-
versity of Minnesota Press, 1986), pp. 16-27.
10. On series and serialization, see G. Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, Mark
Lester with Charles Stivale, trs., Constantin V. Boundas, ed. (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1990), pp. 36-47.
11. For Deleuze’s critique of transcendental philosophy, see, for ex-
ample, The Logic of Sense, pp. 109-117 see also infra.
12. Dialogues, p. vii.
13. V. Descombes, Modern French Philosophy, L. Scott-Fox and J.M. Hard-
ing, trs. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 152; 155.
14, J. Derrida, Writing and Difference, Alan Bass, tr. and introd. (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 151.
15. Modern French Philosophy, p. 161.
16. See V. Descombes, Modern French Philosophy, pp. 152 ff.
17. G. Deleuze, “Lettre 4 Cressole,” p. 110.
18. See, for example, Dialogues, p. 12.
19. See The Logic of Sense, pp. 101-102.
20. See The Logic of Sense, pp. 109-117 and also 301-320.
21. See G. Deleuze, Foucault, Sean Hand, tr. (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1988), pp. 107- 113; and G. Deleuze, Le Pli: Leibniz et
le Baroque, pp. 20-37.
22. I have learned a great deal from, and admired a great deal, John
Caputo’s Radical Hermeneutics: Repetition, Deconstruction and the Hermeneutic
Project (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987); but, in the last anal-
ysis, it seems to me that his version of radical hermeneutics should not be
stored up in old hermeneutic bottles; I am afraid, though, that in his cellar
Caputo has kept a lot of these bottles.
23. See Foucault, p. 114. On intensive forces, see G. Deleuze, Différence
et répétition (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1985), pp. 286-336.
24. See Bergsonism, pp. 91-113; see also G. Deleuze, Cinema 1: The
Movement-Image, Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, trs. (Minnea-
polis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), pp. 56-70.
25. See Foucault, pp. 94-123; see also Le Pli: Leibniz et le Baroque, pp.
27-37.
26. See, for example, Différence et répétition (Paris: Presses Universitaires
de France, 1968), pp. 213
27. See infra, pp. 107- 109.
28. Infra, pp. 112 ff.
29. Infra, p. 105.
30. Infra, pp. 87-88.
31. See An Enquiry, p. 21, note. Deleuze’s acceptance of the equivalence
of the terms “innate” and “primitive” testifies to his subscription to a strong
phenomenalist reading of Hume.
32. For Deleuze’s theory of repetition, and for the relation between
repetition and difference, see Différence et répétition, passim.
{36
TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION
33. Infra, pp. 120-121.
34. Infra, pp. 41-42. A general rule or norm is a system of goal-oriented
means. It is an “extensive” rule whenever it helps transcend the limited
number of cases which give rise to it; it is a “corrective” rule whenever it
corrects our feelings and lifts our attention from our particular circumstances.
35. The idea in search of a concept has been discussed in Différence et
répétition, chap. 4, but also in The Critical Philosophy of Kant, Hugh Tomlinson
and Barbara Habberjam, trs. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1984), p. 56.
36. For the often overlooked difference between “indeterminacy” and
“undecidability,” see J. Derrida, Limited Inc (Evanston: Northwestern Uni-
versity Press, 1988), pp. 115 ff.
37. Calvin O. Schrag, for instance, has argued for the reprieve of the
praxiological subject, and John Fekete complained about the eclipse of the
critical memory of a subject which is “never yet p.” See C. O. Schrag,
Communicative Praxis and the Space of Subjectivity (Bloomington: Indiana Uni-
versity Press, 1986), esp. Part 2; see also J. Fekete, The Structural Allegory:
Reconstructive Encounters with the New French Thought (Minneapolis: Univer-
sity of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. xviii.
38. “Neo-Structuralism” is the label coined by Manfred Frank and made
to designate the theory of those that we used to call “poststructuralists” or
“New French Theorists”. See his What is Neo-Structuralism? Sabine Wilke
and Richard Gray, trs. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989).
39. In this respect, Deleuze’s approach to the question of the Self and
the Other is more nuanced. In fact, for him, the structure-Other and the
structure-Self are contemporaneous. Only the reduction of the Other will
permit the disclosure of pre-individual singularities and events behind the
structure-Self. The real transcendental field, for Deleuze, requires the epoch
of an altrucide and a suicide. See The Logic of Sense, pp. 301-321.
40. Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, p. 96.
41. Foucault, p. 97.
42. See Manfred Frank, Die Unhintergehbarkeit von Individualitat (Frank-
furt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986), passim.
43. Infra, p. 85, p. 86.
44. See Dialogues, p. 93.
45. See Foucault, p. 106.
46. This is the title of Philippe Hodard’s book, published in Paris by
Aubier-Montaigne in 1981.
47. Deleuze’s most concise discussion of time can be found in Différence
et répétition, pp. 96-128.
48. On “repetition,” see Différence et répétition, pp. 365-390; on “absolute
memory,” Foucault, p. 107; on “assembling” and “subjectivity,” see One
Thousand Plateaus, pp. 264-265; on “becoming-other,” see Dialogues, pp.
124 ff.
49. Infra, pp. 37-40.
50. Infra, p. 63.
(%7
TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION
51. André Cresson and Gilles Deleuze, Hume, sa vie, son oeuvre avec un
exposé de sa philosophie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1952), p. 69.
52. Infra, p. 100. 7
53. This decisively Kantian reading of Hume has been critically discussed
by Patricia de Martelaere in “Gilles Deleuze, Interpréte de Hume,” Revue
Philosophique de Louvain (May 1984), 82:224-248.
54. “Hume,” La Philosophie, F. Chatelet et al., eds., 2:232.
Chapter One: The Problem of Knowledge and the
Problem of Ethics
1. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, L. A. Selby-Bigge, ed.
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1888), p. 405. Hereafter referred to as Treatise.
Treatise, p. 521.
Treatise, p. 493.
Treatise, p. 253.
Treatise, p. 24.
Treatise, p. 10. ;
Treatise, p. 125; Indifference as “primitive situation” of the mind.
. Treatise, p. 10.
. The Treatise contains an essential text: ‘As all simple ideas may be
separated by the imagination, and may be united again in what form it
pleases, nothing wou’d be more unaccountable than the operations of that
faculty, were it not guided by some universal principles, which render it,
in some measure, uniform with itself in all times and places. More ideas
entirely loose and unconnected, chance alone wou’d join them; .. ” P- 10.
10. Treatise, pp. 10, 225: “... upon [...] removal [of the principles]
human nature must immediately perish and go to ruin.”
11. Treatise, pp. 74, 107, 109.
12. Treatise, p. 10.
13. Treatise, p. 13: “... that quality, by which two ideas are connected
together in the imagination... .”
14. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (La Salle:
Open Court, 1966), p. 58. Hereafter referred to as An Enquiry. Purposiveness
is the agreement between the principles of human nature and Nature itself.
“Here, then, is a kind of pre-established harmony between the cause of
nature and the succession of our ideas.”
15. David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, by Nelson Pike,
ed. and commentary (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970), pp. 97£ Hereafter
referred to as Dialogues.
16. Treatise, p. 13.
17. Treatise, pp. 10-11.
18. Treatise, p. 13.
19. Treatise, p. 260.
20. Treatise, p. 35.
21. Treatise, p. 146. ; ;
22. Treatise, p. 237: “In our arrangement of bodies we never fail to place
CONAKH AYN
138
1. THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE AND OF ETHICS
such as are resembling, in contiguity to each other, or at least in corre-
spondent points of view: Why? but because we feel a satisfaction in joining
the relation of contiguity to that of resemblance, or the resemblance of
situation to that of qualities.” See also Treatise, p- 504, note.
23. Treatise, p. 165.
24. Treatise, p. 164.
25. Treatise, p. 406.
26. Treatise, p. 405.
27. Treatise, p. 167.
28. Treatise, pp. 167, 169.
29. Treatise, p. 408.
30. Treatise, p. 400: “Every object is determin’d by an absolute fate to a
certain degree and direction of its motion, and can no more depart from
that precise line, in which it moves, than it can convert itself into an angel,
OF spirit, or any superior substance. The actions, therefore, of matter are to be
regarded as instances of necessary actions; and whatever is in this respect on the
same footing with matter, must be acknowledg’d to be necessary.” The italics
are mine.
31. Treatise, p. 273.
32. Auguste Comte, The Positive Philosophy, H. Martineau, tr. (New
York: Belford, Clarke, 188-), p- 384.
33. Treatise, p. 19: “That is a contradiction in terms; and even implies
the flattest of all contradictions, viz. that ’tis possible for the same thing
both to be and not to be.”
34. Treatise, p. 168.
35. Jean Laporte has shown adequately the immediately contradictory
character that a practice expressed as an idea assumes in Hume’s writings.
In this sense, the impossible formula of abstraction is: how could we turn
1 into 2? And the impossible formula of the necessary connection is: how
could we turn 2 into 1? Se his Le probleme de Vabstraction (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1940).
36. See Treatise, p. 264, on the “forelorn solitude” of the philosopher,
and p. 159 on the uselessness of long reasonings.
37. Treatise, p. 277.
38. Treatise, pp. 628-629.
39. With respect to general ideas, Hume states clearly that to understand
his thesis we must first go through the critique. “Perhaps these four reflex-
ions may se to remove all difficulties to the hypothesis I have propos’d
concerning abstract ideas, so contrary to that, which has hitherto prevail’d
in philosophy. But to tell the truth I place my chief confidence in what I
have already prov’d concerning the impossibility of general ideas, according
to the common method of explaining them.” Treatise, p- 24. To understand
what an affection of the mind is, we must go through the critique of the
psychology of the mind.
40. Treatise, p- 165.
41. Treatise, p. 162.
42. Treatise, p. 179: “... reason is nothing but a wonderful and unin-
149
1. THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE AND OF ETHICS
telligible instinct in our souls, which carries along a certain train of ideas,
and endows them with particular qualities... .”
43. Treatise, p. 187.
44. Treatise, p. 583.
45. Treatise, p. 8.
46. Treatise, p. 37; the italics are mine. See also Treatise, p. 287.
47. Treatise, p. 636.
48. Treatise, pp. 319-320.
49. Treatise, p. 317, An Enquiry, pp. 89-90.
50. Treatise, p. 406: The prisoner “‘when conducted to the scaffold, fore-
sees his death as certainly from the constancy and fidelity of his guards as
from the operation of the ax or wheel.” Between moral and physical evi-
dence, there is no difference of nature. See Treatise, p. 171.
51. An Enquiry, p. 90: “These records of wars, intrigues, factions, and
revolutions, are so many collections of experiments, by which the politician
or moral philosopher fixes the principles of his science, in the same manner
as the physician or natural philosopher becomes acquainted with the nature
of plants, minerals, and other external objects, by the experiments which
he forms concerning them.”
52. Treatise, p. 416.
53. Treatise, p. 459.
54. Treatise, p. 415.
55. Treatise, p. 457.
56. Treatise, p. 468.
57. Treatise, p. 269.
58. An Enquiry, p. 173.
59. Conversely, through an appropriate change of state of affairs, un-
derstanding investigates itself about the nature of ethics: see Treatise, pp.
270-271.
60. Treatise, p. 169: “This order wou’d not have been excusable, of first
examining our inference from the relation before we had explain’d the
relation itself, had it been possible to proceed in a different method.”
61. Treatise, pp. 468-470.
62. Treatise, p. 471; see also David Hume, An Inquiry Concerning the
Principles of Morals, Charles W. Hendel, ed. and introd. (Indianapolis: Bobbs-
Merrill, 1957), p. 150. Hereafter referred to as Inquiry.
63. Treatise, p. 253: “... we must distinguish betwixt personal identity,
as it regards our thought or imagination, and as it regards our passion or
the concern we take in ourselves.”
64. Treatise, p. 173.
65. Treatise, p. 164.
66. Treatise, pp. 135-136.
67. Treatise, p. 130.
68. Dialogues, pp. 78-79.
69. Treatise, p. 175.
70. Treatise, p. 484.
71. Treatise, p. 497.
40
2. CULTURAL WORLD AND GENERAL RULES
72. Treatise, p. 579.
73. Inquiry, p. 108.
Chapter Two: Cultural World and General Rules
1, David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, L. A. Selby-Bigge, ed.
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1888), p. 472: “’tis only when a character is
considered in general, without reference to our particular interest, that it
causes such a feeling or sentiment, as denominates it morally good or evil.”
Hereafter referred to as Treatise.
2. Treatise, p. 382.
3. Treatise, p. 386.
4. Treatise, p. 387.
5. Treatise, pp. 483-484.
6. Treatise, p. 586.
7. Treatise, p. 488.
8. Treatise, p. 487.
9. Treatise, p. 484.
10. Treatise, p. 487.
11. Treatise, pp. 583, 602-603.
12. Treatise, p. 581.
13. Inquiry, p. 21.
14. Treatise, p. 486.
15. Treatise, p. 619: “Those who resolve the sense of morals into original
instincts of the human mind, may defend the cause of virtue with sufficient
authority; but want the advantage, which those possess, who account for
that sense by an extensive sympathy with mankind.”
16. Treatise, p. 581.
17. Inquiry, p. 45.
18. Treatise, pp. 483-484.
19. David Hume, “Of Parties in General” in Political Essays, Charles W.
Hendel, ed. and introd. (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1953), pp. 77-84.
20. Treatise, p. 591.
21. Treatise, p. 603.
22. Treatise, p. 499.
23. Treatise, p. 490.
24. Treatise, p. 597: “In like manner, therefore, as we establish the laws
of nature, in order to secure property in society, and prevent the opposition
of self-interest; we establish the rules of good-breeding, in order to prevent the
opposition of men’s pride, and render conversation agreeable and
inoffensive.”
25. Treatise, p. 490.
26. Treatise, p. 582: “Experience soon teaches us this method of cor-
recting our sentiments, or at least, of correcting our language, where the
sentiments are more stubborn and inalterable.”
27. Treatise, p. 499.
28. Treatise, pp. 370 371; see also Treatise, p. 370: “the communicated
tal
2. CULTURAL WORLD AND GENERAL RULES
passion of sympathy sometimes acquires strength from the weakness of its
original, and even arises by a transition from affections, which have no
existence.”
29. Treatise, pp. 484-485.
30. Treatise, pp. 492-493; pp. 619-620.
31. Treatise, p. 492.
32. Treatise, p. 489; the italics are mine. In the next chapter, we shall
discuss the correct understanding of “in the judgment and understanding.”
33. Treatise, pp. 619-620: ‘Those who resolve the sense of morals into
original instincts of the human mind, may defend the cause of virtue with
sufficient authority; but want the advantage, which those possess, who ac-
count for that sense by an extensive sympathy with mankind.” “Tho” justice
be artificial, the sense of its morality is natural. Tis the combination of men,
in a system of conduct, which renders any act of justice beneficial to society.
But when once it has that tendency, we naturally approve of it... .”
34. Treatise, p. 583.
35. Treatise, p. 521: “. . . teach us that we can better satisfy our appetites
in an oblique and artificial manner, than by their headlong and impetuous
motion.’
36. Treatise, p. 526: “Whatever restraint they may impose on the passions
of men, they are the real offspring of those passions, and are only a more
artful and more refin’d way of satisfying them. Nothing is more vigilant
and inventive than our passions. .. .”
37. Treatise, p. 484: “Tho’ the rules of j justice be artificial, they are not
arbitrary. Nor is the expression improper to call them Laws of Nature.”
38. This is the theme of Hume’s “A Dialogue”; see Inquiry, pp. 141-
39. Treatise, p. 619.
40. Treatise, p. 500.
41. Inquiry, section 2.
42. Treatise, pp. 516-517.
43. Treatise, p. 490.
44, Treatise, p. 497.
45. Inquiry, pp. 32-33.
46. Treatise, pp. 501-502.
47. Treatise, pp. 480-481.
48. Treatise, p. 504.
49. Treatise, p. 508.
50. Treatise, pp. 512, 513.
51. Treatise, pp. 502, 555.
52. Treatise, p. 520. In this sense, the promise names persons. See Treatise,
53. Treatise, p. 535; see also p. 538.
54. Treatise, p. 543.
55. Treatise, p. 537.
56. Treatise, p. 554.
57. Treatise, pp. 545-549.
3. IMAGINATION IN ETHICS AND KNOWLEDGE
58. Treatise, pp. 549-553,
59. Treatise, pp. 487-488.
60. Inquiry, pp. 25-26; “Of Interest,” Essays, Moral, Political and Literary
(London: Oxtord University Press, 1963), p. 305.
61. “Of Interest,” Essays, p. 309.
62. “Of Interest,” Essays, p. 307.
63. “Of Commerce,” Essays, p. 268.
64. Elie Halévy, The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism, Mary Morris, tr.
(London: Faber and Faber, 1934), Part 1.
Chapter Three: The Power of the Imagination in
Ethics and Knowledge
Treatise, p. 551.
Treatise, p. 551.
Treatise, p. 358.
Treatise, p. 585.
Treatise, p. 587.
Treatise, p. 585.
Treatise, p. 586.
Treatise, pp. 584-585.
David Hume, “Of Tragedy,” Essays, Moral, Political and Literary, p.
NO 00: SAY Be Oe
10. “Of Tragedy,” Essays, pp. 225-226.
11. Treatise, p. 408.
12. Treatise, p. 12.
13. Treatise, pp. 570-571.
14. Treatise, p. 572.
15. Treatise, pp. 311-312: “It has been observ’d in treating of the un-
derstanding, that the distinction, which we sometimes make betwixt a power
and the exercise of it, is entirely frivolous, and that neither man nor any other
being ought ever to be thought possest of any ability, unless it be exerted
and put in action. But tho’ this be strictly true in a just and philosophical way
of thinking, ’tis certain it is not the philosophy of our passions; but that many
things operate upon them by means of the idea and supposition of power,
independent of its actual exercise.”
16. Treatise, p. 489; the italics are mine.
17. David Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” Hume’s Ethical Writings,
Alasdair MacIntyre, ed. and introd. (New York: Collier Books, 1965), pp.
275-295.
18. Treatise, pp. 506-507, note 1.
19. Treatise, p. 511, note.
20. Treatise, p. 506: “We are said to be in possession of any thing, not
only when we immediately touch it, but also when we are so situated with
respect to it, as to have it in our power to use it; and may move, alter, or
destroy it, according to our present pleasure or advantage. This relation,
then, is a species of cause and effect...” On the subject of casy transition,
sce Treatise, pp. 507 508, 515, S61, 560.
3. IMAGINATION IN ETHICS AND KNOWLEDGE
21. Treatise, p. 504, note 1.
22. “Of the Standard of Taste,” Hume’s Ethical Writings, p. 288.
23. Hence the existence of disputes and violence; see Treatise, p. 506,
note 1: “If we seek a solution of these difficulties in reason and public interest,
we never shall find satisfaction; and if we look for it in the imagination, ’tis
evident, that the qualities, which operate upon that faculty, run so insensibly
and gradually into each other, that ’tis impossible to give them any precise
bounds or termination.’
24, Treatise, p. 568: “But when these titles are mingled and oppos’d in
different degrees, they often occasion perplexity; and are less capable of
solution from the arguments of lawyers and philosophers, than from the
swords of the soldiery.”
25. Treatise, p. 508, note.
26. Treatise, p. 562.
27. Treatise, p. 408.
28. Treatise, pp. 407-408.
29. Treatise, p. 280.
30. Treatise, p. 317.
31. Treatise, p. 340.
32. Treatise, p. 428.
33. Treatise, p. 432.
34. David Hume, An Inquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, Charles
W. Hendel, ed. and introd. (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1957), pp. 33-34.
35. Treatise, pp. 283-284.
36. Treatise, p. 555. See also Treatise, p. 502: “Justice, in her decisions,
never regards the fitness or unfitness of objects to particular persons, but
conducts herself by more extensive views.”
37. Treatise, p. 334.
38. Treatise, p. 69.
39. Treatise, p. 70.
40. Treatise, p. 124.
41. Hume more often uses the term “understanding” with respect to
relations of objects; but this is not an absolute rule; see, for example, Treatise,
p-. 166.
42. Treatise, p. 84.
43. Treatise, p. 89.
44. Treatise, p. 89.
45. Treatise, p. 179.
46. Treatise, p. 130.
47. Treatise, pp. 130, 90.
48. Treatise, pp. 130-131: “But before it attains this pitch of perfection,
it passes thro’ several inferior degrees, and in all of them is only to be esteem’d
a presumption or probability.”
49. Treatise, p. 89.
50. Treatise, p. 179, An Enquiry, pp. 45-46.
51. Treatise, p. 179.
144
3. IMAGINATION IN ETHICS AND KNOWLEDGE
52. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (La Salle:
Open Court, 1966), p. 24.
53. Treatise, pp. 173-176.
54. There is, however, schematism in mathematics. The idea ofa triangle
or the idea of a great number does not find in the mind an adequate idea,
but only a power of producing such an idea: see Treatise, pp. 21 and 22. But
we will not study this schematism here, because it does not belong to re-
lations, but rather to the general ideas.
55. Treatise, p. 265; the italics are mine.
56. An Enquiry, p. 39: “It is impossible, therefore, that any arguments
from experience can prove this resemblance of the past to the future; since
all these arguments are founded on the supposition of that resemblance.”
57. Treatise, pp. 87-88.
58. Treatise, p. 92.
59. Treatise, p. 93.
60. Treatise, pp. 102-103; see also Treatise, p. 114: “[A] belief is an act
of the mind arising from custom . ..”; p. 107: “. . . belief arises only from
causation.”
61. Treatise, p. 265.
62. Treatise, pp. 88-89.
63. Treatise, p. 165.
64. Treatise, p. 134.
65. Treatise, pp. 169-170, 172.
66. Treatise, p. 118.
67. Treatise, pp. 110-111.
68. Treatise, p. 140.
69. Treatise, p. 222.
70. Treatise, p. 116.
71. Treatise, p. 113.
72. Treatise, p. 224.
73. Treatise, p. 117.
74. Treatise, p. 116.
75. Treatise, p. 121.
76. Treatise, pp. 121, 122.
77. Treatise, p. 630.
78. Treatise, p. 123.
79. Treatise, p. 630.
80. Treatise, pp. 147-148.
81. Treatise, p. 148.
82. Treatise, p. 147.
83. Treatise, p. 149.
84. Treatise, p. 133.
85. Treatise, p. 136.
86. Treatise, p. 140.
87. Treatise, p. 149.
88. Treatise, p. 150.
89. ‘Treatise, pp. 149° 150.
145
3. IMAGINATION IN ETHICS AND KNOWLEDGE
90. Treatise, p. 173.
91. Treatise, p. 631: “... the great difference in their feeling proceeds
in some measure from reflexion and general rules. We observe, that the vigour
of conception, which fictions receive from poetry and eloquence, is a cir-
cumstance merely accidental.”
92. Treatise, pp. 147-148.
Chapter Four: God and the Werld
1. David Hume, The Natural History of Religion (London: Adam and
Charles Black, 1956), pp. 5-7. Hereafter referred to as NHR.
2. NHR, p. 2.
3. NHR, p. 10.
4. NHR, p. 29.
5. NHR, p. 88.
6. “A Dialogue,” Inquiry, pp. 156-157.
7. Treatise, p. 607.
8. An Enquiry, p. 120.
9. Dialogues, pp. 22-23, 62.
10. Dialogues, p. 67. ““Why an orderly system may not be spun from the
belly as from the brain [?]....”
11. Dialogues, X; especially p. 90.
12. Dialogues, p. 89.
13. An Enquiry, p. 164.
14, An Enquiry, p. 124.
15. David Hume, “On Suicide,” Essays. Moral, Political and Literary, p.
16. “On Suicide,” Essays, p. 590.
17. Inquiry, p. 30.
18. An Enquiry, p. 145.
19. An Enquiry, p. 59: ‘and though the powers and forces, by which
(nature) is governed, be wholly unknown to us; yet our thoughts and con-
ceptions have still, we find, gone on in the same train with the other works
of nature.”
20. Dialogues, p. 64.
21. Dialogues, p. 104.
22. Dialogues, p. VII.
23. Dialogues, pp. 63-65.
24. Dialogues, p. 67.
25. Treatise, pp. 194-195.
26. Treatise, p. 197.
27. Treatise, pp. 196-197. “I am accustom’d to hear such a sound, and
see such an object in motion at the same time. I have not receiv’d in this
particular instance both these perceptions. These observations are contrary,
unless I suppose that the door still remains, and that it was open’d without
my perceiving it... .”
28. Treatise, p. 198.
146
4. GOD AND THE WORLD
29. Treatise, p. 212.
30. Treatise, p. 255. “... the objects, which are variable or interrupted,
and yet are suppos’d to continue the same, are such only as consist of a
succession of parts, connected together by resemblance, contiguity, or
causation.’
31. rae pp. 198-199.
32. Treatise, pp. 205-206.
33. Treatise, p. 208.
34. Treatise, p. 255.
35. Treatise, p. 194: “Since all impressions are internal and perishing
existences, and appear as such, the notion of their distinct and continu’d
existence must arise from a concurrence of some of their qualities with the
qualities of the imagination; and since this notion does not extend to all of
them, it must arise from certain qualities peculiar to some impressions.” See
also Treatise, p. 255.
36. Treatise, p. 187: The skeptic “... must assent to the principle con-
cerning the existence of body. . . . Nature has not left this to his choice. . . .”
37. Treatise, p. 199.
38. Treatise, p. 207: “As to the first question; we may observe, that what
we call a mind, is nothing but a heap or collection of different perceptions,
united together by certain relations, and suppos’d, tho’ falsely, to be endow’d
with a perfect simplicity and identity. Now as every perception is distin-
guishable from another, and may be consider’d as separately existent; it
evidently follows, that there is no absurdity in separating any particular
perception from the mind... .”
39. Treatise, p. 209: The fiction of a continuous existence and of identity
is really false.
40. Treatise, p. 215.
41. Treatise, p. 218: “ Tis impossible upon any system to defend either
our understanding or senses.” Perception to which we attribute continuous
existence is what refers us to the senses at this point. See Treatise, p. 231:
“Thus there is a direct and total opposition betwixt our reason and our
senses; or more properly speaking, betwixt those conclusions we form from
cause and effect, and those that persuade us of the continu’d and independent
existence of body.”
42. Treatise, p. 215.
43. Treatise, pp. 213-214.
44. Treatise, p. 211.
45. Treatise, p. 215.
46. Treatise, pp. 215-216.
47. Treatise, p. 212.
48. Treatise, p. 215.
49. Dialogues, p. 63: Critique of Cosmologies.
50. Treatise, pp. 220, 222, 223-224.
51. Treatise, pp. 219-225.
52. <'Treatise, p. 226.
53. ‘Treatise, pp. 225 231.
4. GOD AND THE WORLD
54. See Treatise, pp. 245-246, for the description of madness.
55. Treatise, p. 266.
56. Treatise, p. 351.
57. Treatise, pp. 225-226.
58. Treatise, pp. 267-268.
59. Treatise, pp. 181-182.
60. Treatise, p. 269.
Chapter Five: Empiricism and Subjectivity
. An Enquiry, p. 83.
. See chap. 3; see also Treatise, pp. 358ff, 585-587.
. An Enquiry, p. 33.
. Treatise, p. 311.
. “Every thing that enters the mind, being in reality as the perception,
tis impossible any thing shou’d to feeling appear different.” Treatise, p. 190.
6. Treatise, p. 18.
7. Treatise, p. 234; see also Treatise, p. 54: “... every idea that is dis-
tinguishable, is separable by the imagination; and ... every idea that is
separable by the imagination may be conceived to be separately existent.”
8. Treatise, p. 244.
9. Treatise, pp. 79-81; “Accordingly we shall find upon examination,
that every demonstration, which has been produc’d for the necessity of a
cause, is fallacious and sophistical.” Treatise, p. 80.
10. Treatise, p. 202.
11. Treatise, pp. 192, 226-230.
12. “[A]nd fo since the impressions precede their correspondent ideas,
there must be some impressions, which without any introduction make their
appearance in the soul.” Treatise, p. 275.
13. An Enquiry, p. 21, note: If “by innate [we understand] what is original
or copied from no precedent perception, then may we assert that all our
impressions are innate, and our ideas not innate.”
14. Treatise, p. 64.
15. Treatise, p. 60.
16. “But tho’ I have neglected any advantage, which I might have drawn
from this topic in explaining the relations of ideas, I am afraid I must here
have recourse to it, in order to account for the mistakes that arise from these
relations.” Treatise, p. 60.
17. Treatise, p. 207.
18. Treatise, p. 207.
19. Treatise, p. 27.
20. Treatise, p. 27.
21. Treatise, p. 27: “Tis the same case with the impressions of the
senses. ..
22. Treatise, p. 39.
23. Treatise, “Of the Ideas of Space and Time,” sections 1, 2, 4.
24. Treatise, p. 27.
WR ON
”
148
5. EMPIRICISM AND SUBJECTIVITY
25. Treatise, p. 30.
26. Treatise, p. 32.
27. Treatise, p. 38.
28. Treatise, p. 44.
29. Treatise, p. 28: “Nothing can be more minute, than some ideas. .. .
30. Treatise, p. 30.
31. “The only defect in our senses is, that they give us disproportion’d
images of things, and represent as minute and uncompounded what is really
great and compos’d of a vast number of parts.” Treatise, p. 28.
32. Treatise, “Of the Ideas of Space and Time,” 3 and 5.
33. Treatise, p. 40.
34. Treatise, p. 36.
35. Treatise, p. 53.
36. “When we diminish or encrease a relish, ’tis not after the same
manner that we diminish or increase any visible object; and when several
sounds strike our hearing at once, custom and reflection alone make us form
an idea of the degrees of the distance and contiguity of those bodies, from
which they are derived.” Treatise, p. 235.
37. Treatise, p. 56. It should be noted that Hume, in this passage as much
as in the preceding one, is not raising at all the question about the precise
manner in which visual and tactile impressions are distributed as opposed
to the distribution of the data from other senses. The reason is that Hume
does not seem to be interested in this purely psychological problem.
38. Treatise, p. 239.
39. Treatise, pp. 34-35.
40. Treatise, p. 65.
41. Treatise, p. 239.
42. Treatise, p. 503. See especially Burke, for whom prescription grounds
the right of property.
43. Treatise, p. 503.
44. Treatise, pp. 508-509.
45. “But as we find by experience, that belief arises only from causation,
and that we can draw no inference from one object to another, except they
be connected by this relation... .” Treatise, p. 107.
46. Treatise, p. 624.
47. Treatise, p. 627.
48. Treatise, p. 165.
49. Treatise, pp. 102-103.
50. An Enquiry p. 47.
51. An Enquiry, p 39.
52. An Enquiry, pp. 26-27.
53. “The chief exercise of the memory is not to preserve the simple
ideas, but their order and position.” Treatise, p. 9.
54. “The idea of sinking is so closely connected with that of water, and
the idea of suffocating with that of sinking, that the mind makes the tran-
sition without the assistance of the memory.” ‘Treatise, p. 104.
55. Treatise, pp. 104 105,
”
149
5. EMPIRICISM AND SUBJECTIVITY
56. Treatise, pp. 167-168.
57. An Enquiry, p. 39. The italics are mine.
58. Treatise, Part 3, sect. 6: difference between understanding and imag-
ination, p. 92; difference between causality as a philosophical relation and
causality as natural relation, p. 93.
59. Treatise, p. 265.
60. We use the term “spontaneity” in view of the following idea: the
principles constitute a subject in the mind at the same time that this subject
establishes relations among ideas.
61. Treatise, p. 60.
62. Treatise, p. 37. The italics are mine.
63. Treatise, p. 287.
64. Treatise, pp. 394-396.
65. Treatise, p. 287.
66. Treatise, pp. 280-281.
67. Treatise, p. 368.
68. Treatise, pp. 287 and 395.
69. Treatise, p. 69.
70. Treatise, p. 46.
71. Treatise, p. 239.
72. Treatise, p. 65.
73. Treatise, p. 74.
74. Treatise, p. 13.
75. Treatise, p. 11.
76. Treatise, pp. 10-11.
77. “Thus distance will be allowed by philosophers to be a true relation,
because we acquire an idea of it by the comparing of objects: But in a
common way we say, that nothing can be more distant than such or such things
from each other, nothing can have less relation” Treatise, p. 14.
78. Treatise, p. 185.
79. Treatise, p. 14. The italics are mine.
80. H. Bergson, Matter and Memory, N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer, trs.
(New York: Humanities Press, 1978 [1911]), pp. 178-179.
81. “... [W]e are only to regard [the uniting principle among ideas] as
a gentle force, which commonly prevails, and is the cause why, among other
things, languages so nearly correspond to each other.” Treatise, p. 10.
82. Treatise, p. 13. The italics are mine.
83. On the link between circumstances and belief and on the differential
significance of the circumstance itself, see Treatise, pp. 627-628: “It fre-
quently happens, that when two men have been engag’d in any scene of
action, the one shall remember it much better than the other, and shall have
all the difficulty in the world to make his companion recollect it. He runs
over several circumstances in vain, mentions the time, the place, the com-
pany, what was said, what was done on all sides; till at last he hits on some
lucky circumstance, that revises the whole, and gives his friend a perfect
memory of every thing.”
84. Treatise, pp. 23-24. The italics are mine.
150
6. PRINCIPLES OF HUMAN NATURE
Chapter Six: Principles of Human Nature
1. Treatise, p. 265.
2. Treatise, p. 179; the ttalics are mine.
3. I. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Norman Kemp Smith, tr. (Toronto:
Macmillan, 1929), pp. 132. 133: ‘Che Synthesis of Reproduction in Imag-
ination.” Hereafter referred to as Critique.
4. Critique, p. 139: “But as regards the empirical rule of association,
which we must postulate throughout when we assert that everything in the
series of events is so subject to rule that nothing ever happens save in so far
as something precedes it on which it universally follows—upon what, I ask,
does this rule, as a law of nature, rest? How is this association itself possible?
The ground of the possibility of the association of the manifold, so far as
it lies in the object, is named the affinity of the manifold. I therefore ask,
how are we to make comprchensive to ourselves the thoroughgoing affinity
of appearances, whereby they stand and must stand under unchanging laws?”
5. Critique, pp. 145-146: “Since the imagination is itself a faculty of
a priori synthesis, we assign to it the title, productive imagination. In so far
as it aims at nothing but necessary unity in the synthesis of what is manifold
in appearance, it may be entitled the transcendental function of imagination.”
6. Critique, pp. 345-352.
7. Critique, p. 142: “This synthetic unity presupposes or includes a
synthesis, and if the former is to be a priori necessary, the synthesis must
also be a priori. The transcendental unity of apperception thus relates to the
pure synthesis of imagination, as an a priori condition of the possibility o!
all combination of the manifold in one knowledge.”
8. Treatise, pp. 440-441.
9. Treatise, p. 275.
10. Treatise, p. 37.
11. Treatise, pp. 276-277.
12. Treatise, p. 13.
13. Treatise, p. 282: “... we find in the course of nature, that tho’ the
effects be many, the principles, from which they arise, are commonly hu
few and simple, and that ’tis the sign of an unskillful naturalist to have
recourse to a different quality, in order to explain every different operation
How much more must this be true with regard to the human mind, whieh
being so confin’d a subject may justly be thought incapable of contatuiny,
such a monstrous heap of principles. . . .”
14. Treatise, pp. 20-21.
15. Treatise, pp. 16-17.
16. Treatise, p. 25.
17. Treatise, p. 13.
18. Treatise, p. 17.
19. Treatise, p. 265.
20. Treatise, p. 169: “This order wou’d not have been excusable, of first
examining our inference from the relation before we had explain’d the
relation itself, had it been possible to proceed in a different ranrlalk But as
the nature of the relation depends so much on that of the infercnee, we
6. PRINCIPLES OF HUMAN NATURE CONCLUSION: PURPOSIVENESS
have been oblig’d to advance in this seemingly preposterous manner, and 23. Inquiry, p. 56, note.
make use of terms before we were able exactly to define them, or fix their 24. Inquiry, p. 112.
meaning.” 25. Inquiry, p. 110.
21. Treatise, p. 93. 26. Treatise, p. 504.
22. Treatise, p. 163. 27. An Enquiry, p. 36.
23. Treatise, p. 78: “Tis necessary for us to leave the direct survey of 28. An Enquiry, p. 59.
this question concerning the nature of that necessary connexion, which enters
into our idea of cause and effect; and endeavour to find some other questions,
the examination of which will perhaps afford a hint, that may serve to clear
up the present difficulty.”
24. Treatise, p. 170.
25. Treatise, p. 439.
26. Treatise, p. 276.
27. Treatise, p. 278.
28. Treatise, p. 278.
29. Treatise, p. 287.
30. Treatise, pp. 438-439.
31. Treatise, p. 285.
32. Treatise, p. 289.
33. Treatise, pp. 304-305.
34. Treatise, pp. 438-439.
35. Treatise, p. 493.
Conclusion: Purposiveness
1. Inquiry, pp. 106-107.
2. Treatise, p. 414
3. Inquiry, p. 111.
4. Treatise, p. 414.
5. Treatise, p. 414.
6. Inquiry, p. 108.
7. Inquiry, p. 62.
8. Inquiry, p. 68.
9. Treatise, p. 416.
10. Inquiry, p. 105.
11. Inquiry, p. 112.
12. Treatise, p. 107; see also An Enquiry, pp. 55-57.
13. Inquiry, p. 108.
14. Inquiry, p. 108.
15. Treatise, pp. 23-24.
16. Treatise, pp. 22-23.
17. Treatise, p. 107.
18. Treatise, pp. 109-110.
19. Treatise, pp. 44-47.
20. Inquiry, p. 56, note.
21. Inquiry, p. 109.
22. Inquiry, p. 64.
152 153
INDEX
Abstract ideas, 114, 132
Accidental, and essential, 55f, 59
Accord: between nature and
human nature, 111, 112;
between powers of nature and
principles of human nature,
109; between subject and the
given, 111
Action, 124, 126
Aesthetics, 57, 60
Affection(s): give mind its
qualities, 26; reflected in
imagination, 59
Affectivity, 8, 103, 125; and
circumstance, 103
Altrucide, 13739
Anticipation, 6, 13, 14, 92; and
belief, 133
Antinomy of the world, 18
Apperception, 111
Artifice, 15, 58, 61; and habit, 68;
and invention, 86; and nature,
43; and sympathy, 43
Assemblage, 1
Association, 63, 65, 114, 120,
123; affects che imagination,
24; its effect, 25; of ideas, ix,
22, 103; and imagination, 63;
physiological explanation of,
89; principles of, 16, 17, 24,
98, 100f, 103f, 112; and
relations, 101; and religion, 73;
tule of the imagination, 63;
and understanding, 32; for the
sake of passions, 132
Associationism, 7, 17, 27, 48,
102, 105, 107, 120, 132; is not
atomism, 27; and external
relations, 100, 108; and
utilitarianism, 120
Atom, 92; and structure, 7
Atomism, 7, 27, 92, 105, 107; is
not associationism, 27; and
external relations, 105
Belief, ix, 6, 12, 13, 32, 58, 68f,
71, 86, 92f, 94, 96, 115, 120,
129, 132; and anticipation,
133; and artifice, 58; in the
existence of bodies, 81; and
imagination, 72; and inference,
INDEX
86; and rule, 79; and
sympathy, 32, 85, 120
Bellour, R., 13576
Bentham, Jeremy, 43
Bergson, Henrie, 1, 4, 5, 7, 13,
44, 48, 92, 102, 103, 113; and
phenomenology, 5; -series, 13
Bergsonism, 135nn1, 24
Berkeley, George, 10
Body: without organs, 1; and
subject, 97; and subjectivity, 97
Bogue, Roland, 135”4
Caputo, John, 13622
Causality, 24, 114f, 116, 120,
124, 125; fictitious or
excessive, 78; and property,
120
Chaosmos, 14
Cinema 1: The Movement Image,
136n24
Circumstance(s), 8, 14, 103, 115,
120, 126, 129, 130, 131; and
affectivity, 103; and relation,
103, 104; and subject, 103
Collection, of ideas becoming
system, 22
Commerce, 51f, 53
Communicative Praxis and The
Space of Subjectivity, 137037
Comte, Auguste, 139732
Concordia discordata, 10
Consciousness, 5
Contiguity, 114f
Continuous existence, 78f, 80
Contradiction, between extension
and reflection, 81; between
imagination and reason, 81, 82;
between senses and
understanding, 81; and
sympathy, 43
Convention, not a contract, 46;
and society, 46
Conversation, and violence, 40, 41
Correction, 72; and general rules,
42f; and understanding, 84
Corrective rules, 9, 15, 18, 131;
156
and religion, 75f
“Cracked I,” 14
Cressole, Michel, 135n6
Cresson, André, 2; Hume: sa vie,
non oeuvre, avec un exposé de sa
philosophie, 137n51
Critical philosophy, 8; and
empiricism, 111
The Critical Philosophy of Kant,
137n35
Critique, 9; empirical, 87; and
fiction, 9; of interiority, 11; of
phenomenology, 7; of rules, 8,
72
Critique of Pure Reason, 151n3, 4,
5, 6, 157n7
Culture, 56, 61f, 76, 130; and
fancy, 62; and general rules,
37-54; and history, 60; and
nature, 43, 44, 49, 60
Custom, 114; and reason, 48
Deleuze, 135n6; and empiricism,
3-9; and subjectivity, 9-19
Deleuze and Guattari, 135n4
Délire, 1
Delirium, 18, 23, 83, 84; and
ancient philosophy, 83; and
modern philosophy, 83f
Derrida, Jacques, 3, 137736
Descartes, René, 105, 106
Descombes, Vincent, 3
Dialectics and empiricism, 8
Dialogues, 3, 12, 25, 77, 135n6,
137n44
Dialogues Concerning Natural
Religion, passim
Difference: between one mind and
another, 103; and empiricism,
90; principle of, 7, 87f
Différence et Répétition, 136nn23,
26, 32, 35; 47; 48
Disparate, the, 7
Disposition, spontancity of, 97
Distinct existence of objects, 78f
Distribution, of elements, 92,
INDEX
Drive, and institution, 47
Duality, 109
Duration, 92
Duty, 58
Egoism, 38; Hume’s critique of,
44f; and sympathy, 38f
Elan, 95
Empirical critique, 87
Empiricism, 3, 4, 85, 87, 91, 104,
107; and associationism, 31;
not atomism, 31; criterion of,
109; and critical philosophy,
111; definition of, 107; and
Deleuze, 3-9; Deleuze’s
definition of, 6f; and dialectics,
8; and difference, 90; essence
of, 87; not geneticism, 108;
ground of, 24; opposed to
psychologism, 108; paradox of,
9; and phenomenology, 5f;
philosophy of the imagination,
7, 10; and physicalism, 119;
radical, 5; and subjectivity, 14,
85-104; traditional definition
of, 5
An Enquiry Concerning Human
Understanding, passim
“The Essay on Miracles,” 76
Essays, Moral, Political and Literary,
142n60, 143nn61, 62, 63;
146nn15, 16
Essential, and accidental, 55f, 59
Esteem: foundation of justice, 40;
and sympathy, 44
Ethical subject, 15
Ethical totality, 15
Ethics: and knowledge, 21-36; and
passion, 32; and rules, 36; and
understanding, 34
Exception, 55f
Excess, 128
Excessive rules, 129, 131
Exclusion, 39; and morality, 35;
and sympathy, 37f
Exclusive disjunctions, 16
Expericnee, 6, 96, 107f; partes
extra partes, 71; and principle of
nature, 67; and relations, 108
Extension, 16, 18, 51, 55, 72, 76,
91; as correction, 59f; and
general rules, 42f; and
knowledge, 127; of the
passions, 59; and reflection, 18,
59, 81, 82; and sympathy, 37f;
and understanding, 35
Extensive rules, 9, 15, 71, 73f, 79;
and religion, 75
Extensive schematism, 131
Externality of relations, 6, 7
Ewald, F., 13516
Fancy, 25f, 59, 60, 61f, 70, 84,
123, 126, 130, 131, 132; and
culture, 62; and illusion, 59;
and imagination, 32; and mind,
83; and subject, 129; and
world, 131
Feeling, 49
Fekete, John, 137n37
Fiction, 9, 99, 129, 131f; and
critique, 9; opposed to the
principles of association, 83; as
principle, 82f; and principles,
129; and principles of human
nature, 80
Fold, 4, 5, 11
Fontenelle, Bernard le Bovier, 57
Foucault, Michel, 11, 12
Foucault, 12, 136nn 21, 23, 25,
137nn40, 41, 45, 48
Frank, Manfred, 11, 137nn38, 42
Freedom, rule of, 58
Freud, Sigmund, 102, 103
General ideas, 25, 114, 128
General interest, 130
General rules, 15, 41, 46, 49, 51,
55, 57, 59, 69, 73, 82; and
animals, 60; extensive and
corrective, 42f; and
imagination, 79; and
institution, 46; in morality and
INDEX
knowledge, 68f; and subject,
86; and sympathy, 49f
Genesis, 108; in Hume’s
empiricism, 66
Given, 87, 91, 92, 107, 108f, 111,
127, 133; atom and structure,
92; and experience, 28f; and
nature, 133
God, 73-84; cause of the
principles, 77; and world, 73-
84
Government, 50f; and justice, 50f
The Growth of Philosophic
Radicalism, 143n64
Habit, x, 8, 9, 16, 44, 66, 67f, 69,
71, 72, 92f, 94, 95, 96, 114,
116, 133; and artifice, 68; and
experience, 67, 68, 69, 71; and
imagination, 9; paradox of, 66;
and repetition, 71
Halévy, Elie, 53, 143n64
Harmony, 17, 132; pre-
established, 77; between
powers of nature and subject,
89
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich,
100
Heidegger, Martin, 4
Histoire de la Philosophie, 2, 135n5
History: and culture, 60; and
differences, 47; and human
nature, 44
Human nature, 6, 65f, 101, 114,
119, 132, 133; and history, 44;
principles of, 105-21
Human sciences, 22
Hume: -effect, 13; and egoism,
38; -series, 13
Hume: sa vie, son oeuvre, avec un
exposé de sa philosophie, 137051
Hume’s, critique of representation,
30; critique of social contract,
45; dualism, 44, 111; economic
theory, 52f; paradox, 26;
political economy, 45;
158
psychology, 27; science of
humanity, 21
Hume’s Ethical Writings, 143nn17,
22
Hodard, Philippe, 137746
Husserl, Edmund, 4
Idea(s), 29f, 30f, 132; abstract,
114, 132; general, 114, 128;
and impressions, 29f;
indivisibility of, 90f; relations
of, 66; not represenations of
objects, 88; and subject, 101
Identity, problem of, 99
Illusion, ix
Imagination, 8, 18, 23, 24f, 48,
57, 58f, 61, 62f, 63, 64, 70,
71, 72, 79, 82, 87, 92, 96,
110, 111, 115, 123, 127, 130;
and affection, 59; and
association, 63; constituted and
constitutive, 82; constitutive
and creative, 80; and culture,
58f; exceeding, 71; and fancy,
23, 32; and general rule, 79;
and habit, 9; and ideas, 23; and
institution, 48; and passions,
62f; and reason, 81; and
reflection of passions, 59;
synthesis of, 110f; and totality,
64; and understanding, 67, 131
Impressions, 29f, 30f, 88, 97, 128,
132; of emotion, 117; of the
passions, 125; of reflection, 97,
113, 114f, 116, 117, 120, 125;
of sensation, 113, 114f, 117,
120
Indifference, 84
Individuation, 17; of the subject,
104
Indivisibility of elements, 92
Inference, 115; and belief, 86; and
morality, 35; and subject, 34
An Inquiry Concerning the Principles
of Morals, passim
Instinct, 133; and institution, 47f,
49; and justice, 44
INDEX
Institution and drive, 47; and
imagination, 48; and instinct,
47f, 49; and law, 45f; and
need, 46; system of means, 47;
and utility, 47
Integration, 39f; and morality, 36;
and sympathy, 39
Intensity, 13, 16
Intensive schematism, 131
Interest, practical and speculative,
6, 17; rule of, 58; rule and
utility, 49
Invention, 12, 14, 15, 40, 86, 92f,
94, 130, 132, 133; and artifice,
86; and legislation, 41; and
morality, 35; political, 50; and
society, 46; and totality, 40, 86
James, William, 99
Justice, 32, 43, 44, 49, 50f; and
esteem, 40; and government,
50f; and instinct, 44; and
passions, 43, 44; not a principle
of nature, 40; scheme of, 36;
single, 50f; and totality, 49
Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature,
1, 136n9
Kant, ix, 75,99, 105, 107, 109,
110f, 114, 119
Knowing subject, 120
Knowledge, 71, 132; and ethics,
21-36; extensive, 127; and
mental activity, 127; and
morality, 68; and passions, 6,
129; and transcendence, 28, 34
Lack and society, 46
Language and belief, 70
Laporte, Jean, 92, 13935
Law and institution, 45f
Lecercle, Jean-Jacques, 1
Legislation and invention, 41
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 1,
11, 107; -effect, 13; -scries, 13
Limited Inc., 137036
159
The Logic of Sense, 1, 3, 4, 12,
136nn10, 11, 19, 20
Lucretius, 4
Madness, 83, 84
Martelaere, Patricia de, 138753
Memory, 94f
Merleau Ponty, Maurice, 4
Mind, 7, 59, 87, 88, 91, 96, 98,
99, 119f, 123, 124, 127, 132;
activity and passivity, 119;
affections of, 21; collection of
ideas, 22; collection of
impressions and ideas, 132;
constitution of, 31; and
delirium, 23, 83; and fancy,
83; and human nature, 59, 92;
imagination and ideas, 22; and
madness, 3, 22; not the
representation of nature, 88;
passivitiy of, 26; and principles
of human nature, 15; product
of the powers of nature, 17;
quantity, 90, schematism of,
127; and self, 31; and space,
91; and subject, 7, 23, 26, 31,
112, 119; tendency of, 25; and
time, 91; and transcendence,
29
Minoritarian discourse, 2
Modern French Philosophy, 3
Morality, 124, 126; and exclusion,
35; general rules and justice,
32; and inference, 35; and
integration, 36; and invention,
35; and knowledge, 68; and
nature, 40; and politics, 41;
and reason, 123, 124; and
totality, 40
Moral obligation, 42
Moral schematism, 131
Moral world, artificial totality, 41
The Natural History of Religion,
146nn1, 2, 3, 4,5
Natural relations, 114f, 116, 123
Nature, 6; and artifice, 43; and
INDEX
being, 133; and culture, 43,
44, 49, 60; and the given, 133;
and human nature, 6; and
morality, 40; powers of, 109;
and principle of resemblance,
47; and society, 46
Need and institution, 46
Necessary relation, 26
Neostructuralism, 9f, 137n38
Nietzsche, 4, 13; -Foucault-series,
14; -Klossowski-series, 14
Obligation, moral, 42; natural 42
“On the Immortality of the
Soul,” 76
Paradox of empiricism, 9
Parnet, Claire, 3
Partiality, 15, 39, 51, 130; and
sympathy, 38f; and
transcendence, 41
Passion(s), 55, 62f, 64, 97f, 116f,
118, 120, 129, 132; and
association, 63; and ethics, 32;
and fancy, 60; and imagination,
56, 62f; and justice, 43, 44;
and knowledge, 6, 129;
principles of, 16, 98, 103f,
112, 116, 117, 120, 124; and
religion, 73; and tragedy, 57f
Past, 94, 95
Perceptions, atomic and distinct, 6
Phenomenology, 4; and Bergson,
5; critique of, 7, 12; and
empiricism, 5f
Philosophical relations, 114f, 116
Philosophy and superstition, 76
Philosophy through the Looking
Glass: Language, Nonsense,
Desire, 135n3
Physicalism, 119
Plato, 107
Pleasure, 124
Le Pli: Leibniz et le Baroque, 4,
1352, 136nn21, 25
Political Economy, 45, 51
Political Essays, 141019
Politics and morality, 41
Polytheism, 73f
The Positive Philosophy, 139n32
Positivism and skepticism, 34
Practical interest, 6, 17
Practical reason, 44, 64
Practical subject, 121
Practice: primacy of, 17; and
reason, 33; and subjectivity, 17;
theory of, 32
Principle(s), 66, 96, 113, 114,
123, 132, 133; of affectivity,
125; of association, 15, 16, 17,
60f, 83, 98, 100f, 103f, 112,
113, 114f, 116, 118, 123, 132,
133; of difference, 7, 87f, 90;
of empiricism, 90; of
experience, 119; and fictions
129; of human nature, 6, 8,
15, 27, 80, 98, 105-21, 109; of
passion, 15, 16, 98, 103f, 112,
113, 116, 117, 120, 124, 130,
131, 133
Probability, philosophical and
non-philosophical, 69f; theory
of, ix
Problem, priority over solutions,
105
Le Probleme de Vabstraction, 139n35
Property, 42, 53, 61f, 93, 120;
and inequality, 51; and totality,
42
Psychological genesis and
empiricism, 119
Psychologism, 108
Psychology of the mind, 27-28
Purpose, 77
Purposiveness, 17, 18f, 77, 112,
121, 123-34, 132, 133
Quality, 101
Radical empiricism, 5
Radical Hermeneutics: Repetition,
Deconstruction and the
Hermeneutic Project, 136n22
Radical phenomenology, 4
INDEX
Rationalism, 30, 128
Reason, 33, 65, 82, 123, 126;
affection of the mind, 30;
conversation of proprietors, 42;
and custom, 48; and feeling,
30; and imagination, 65;
madness and skepticism, 33f;
and morality, 33, 124; and
practice, 33
Recollection, 94f
Reflection, 18, 55f, 57, 79; and
extension, 18, 59, 82;
impressions of, 97; of the
passions, 59; and subject, 85
Relations, 6, 98, 99, 123, 128,
132; and associations, 101; and
circumstances, 103, 104;
critique of, 120; and
experience 108; external, 66f,
98f, 100, 101, 105, 107; and
genesis, 108; of ideas, 66, 127;
logic of, x; natural, 101, 116,
123; philosophical, 101, 114f,
116; and principles of
association, 100, 108; and
principles of human nature, 6;
and representation, 30, 120;
and spontaneity, 96f; and
synthesis, 100
Religion, 17f, 73; accidental and
essential, 73f; and corrective
rules, 75f; and culture, 76; and
extensive rules, 73, 75; and
imagination, 76; knowledge
and passion, 73; and principles,
75, 76; transcending
experience, 74f
Repetition, 8, 67}, 69, 70, 71, 116
Representation, 120; and relations,
30, 120
Representationalism, 8
Resemblance,114
Resonance, 132
Rights and society, 45f
Rule(s), 62; and belief, 79;
corrective, 9, 15, 18, 32, 55f;
corrective and extensive, 55f,
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73; critique of, 8; excessive,
129; excessive and corrective,
131; extensive, 9, 15, 32, 72,
73f; extensive and corrective,
73; of freedom, 58; general,
15, 32, 35, 36, 37-54, 41, 55,
57, 59, 69, 73; interest and
duty, 58; interest and utility,
49; of knowledge, 73; of taste,
57; and vividness, 50
Russell, Bertrand, 99
Scarcity, 51, 53
Schematism, 65; extensive and
intensive, 131; of knowledge,
128, 129; of the mind, 127;
moral, 131
Schrag, Calvin, 137237
Science of humanity, 21
Self, 63, 64, 129; and collection
of ideas, 31; and culture, 64; as
habit, x; and mind, 31; and
politics, 64; and subject, 31,
129
Senses and understanding, 81
Series, 13
Simulacrum, 19, 74
Skepticism and positivism, 34
Social contract, 45, 50
Society: and conventions, 46;
invention and lack, 46; law and
institution, 45; and nature, 46;
and rights, 45f; and utility, 46
Space and mind, 91
Spinoza, 4
Spinoza et le probleme de l’expression,
135n2
State, 51, 52
State of nature, 39
The Structural Allegory:
Reconstructive Encounters with the
New French Thought, 137n37
Structure, 92
Subject, 7, 8, 85, 86f, 89, 92f, 96,
97, 98, 99, 107, 108, 112,
113, 119f, 126f, 132, 133;
activated mind, 26, 119:
INDEX
activity and passivity, 112;
artifice and invention, 14, 86;
belief and artifice, 85f, 92; and
the body, 97; and
circumstances, 103; and
collection of ideas, 64; and
contemplation, 26; and fancy,
129; and the given, 87; and
general rules, 86; and ideas,
101; and imagination, 92;
individuation of, 104; inference
and invention, 34, 85, 86, 92;
knowing, 120; means and ends,
17, 98; and mind, 7, 88; and
the powers of nature, 89;
practical, 121; and principles,
17, 24, 127; and reflection, 85/;
and self, 31, 129; synthesis of,
92; synthesis of time, 92, 94;
and transcendence, 8, 15, 24,
28, 34, 132
Subjectivity, 4, 64, 85, 86, 97;
and the body, 97; and Deleuze,
9-19; and empiricism, 14, 85-
104; impression of reflection,
26, 133; mediation and
transcendence, 85;
physiological explanation, 89;
and practice, 17, 104; and
process, 112-13; and time, 16
Sympathy, 9, 15, 32, 37f, 53, 120;
and artifice, 43; and belief, 32,
85; and contradiction, 43; and
egoism, 38f; and esteem, 44;
and exclusion, 37f; and
extension, 37f; and general
tules, 49f; and integration, 39;
paradox of, 37; and partiality,
38f
Synthesis and relations, 100
System and world, 80
Taste, rule of, 57
Theism, 73f, 77
Theoretical reason, 65
A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism
162
and Schizophrenia, 1, 2, 135n7,
136n9
Time, 16, 99; and mind, 91, 94;
and subject, 16, 92, 94;
synthesis of, 95f
Totality, 49; and artifice, 40; of
culture, 64; ethical, 15; and
imagination, 64; and invention,
40, 86; and morality, 40; and
principles of association, 83
Tournier Michel,
Tragedy, 57f
Transcendence, 29, 86, 100, 111,
127, 132; and knowledge, 34;
and partiality, 41; and subject,
34; and subjectivity, 88
Transcendental: critique, 87;
empiricism, 3-9, 119
A Treatise of Human Nature, passim
Understanding, 22, 33, 62, 71,
72, 79, 84, 96, 118; and
association, 32; corrective
function of, 84; and ethics, 34;
and extension, 35; and
imagination, 67, 131;
probabilities and general rules,
32; and the problems of the
self, 64
Die Unhintergehbarkeit von
Individualitat, 137n42
Useful, the, 125f
Utilitarianism, 46f, 120, 126; and
associationism, 120
Utility, 46, 126; and institution,
47; rule and interest, 49; and
society, 46
Vividness, 128, 129, 132; and
rule, 50
Violence, 40; and conversation,
40, 41
Voluntarism, 100
What is Neo-Structuralism?, 137238
Whole, 92
World, 14, 18, 82, 129; antinomy
INDEX
of the, 18; and fancy, 131;
fiction of the imagination, 75;
an idea, 80; not an object, 78;
system, 80; thought but not
known, 77; the unique, 75
Writing and Difference, 136n14
Zwiefalt, 4
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