Hume: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) by Alfred Ayer

Author:Alfred Ayer [Ayer, Alfred]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2000-10-11T16:00:00+00:00

In developing this theory of manifest objects, I think that I have succeeded in reconciling Hume’s vulgar and philosophical systems, but there remains the problem of reconciling this outcome with the contemporary philosophical system, that is to say, the account of the physical world which is presented by contemporary physics. This problem has many ramifications, into which I cannot enter here. Briefly, what seems to have happened is that the perceptible ‘constructs’ which are needed for the conception of public space are dismissed into the private sector, and their places taken by imperceptible particles. Whether spatial relations can legitimately be severed in this way from their original terms is a debatable question, but it is not obvious to me that they cannot. What we must in any case avoid, as Hume said, is a system which puts physical objects, as they really are, in a duplicate space to which our senses give us no access. If we are to concede physics any pretensions to truth, our interpretation of it must be intelligible.

In the theory of the external world which I have foisted on Hume, personal identity is subordinated to bodily continuity. This was not Hume’s own view, but it does no radical violence to his principles. On the contrary, in the section of the Treatise which he devotes to this topic, he claims it to be ‘evident, the same method of reasoning must be continu’d, which has so successfully explain’d the identity of plants, and animals, and ships and houses, and of all the compounded and changeable productions either of art or nature’ (T 259). The difference is just that Hume equates personal identity with the identity of the mind, and defines this without any reference to the body. When I say that he defines it, I allow for his saying that ‘the identity, which we ascribe to the mind of man is only a fictitious one’, and like our other ascriptions of identity proceeds from the ‘operation of the imagination’ (T 259). I am, however, more influenced by the fact that it is vital to Hume’s account of the passions, and also to his theory of morals, that one does have a genuine idea of oneself, and he is not so inconsistent as to free this idea from all dependence on impressions. What I therefore take him to mean by calling the identity of our minds ‘fictitious’ is that it is not what he calls a ‘true’ identity, that is, the identity of a single unchanging object, but one that can be resolved into a relation between perceptions. There is no implication, any more than in the case of perceptible bodies, that these relations do not really obtain.

There is, indeed, one passage, in the Book ‘Of the Passions’, in a section in which Hume expatiates on the nature of sympathy as a factor in the love of fame, where he actually speaks of our having an impression of ourselves. ‘’Tis evident’, he says, ‘that the idea or rather impression

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