The Routledge Companion to Eighteenth Century Philosophy by Garrett Aaron;

Author:Garrett, Aaron;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1656775
Publisher: Taylor and Francis

David Hume: sympathy and sentiment

The English Parliament passed the Toleration Act in 1689 and Scotland passed its own Toleration Act in 1712. Shaftesbury and Hutcheson had both been concerned about religious superstition and enthusiasm. By the middle of the eighteenth century, lowland Scotland, particularly in Glasgow and Edinburgh, entered a new age of improvement on many fronts, including industry and agriculture, learning and finance, and social refinement. The Scottish Moderates comprised a group of the growing middle class, professionals and intellectuals, who vigorously debated social reforms, and often took active measures to put such reforms into practice. Some of the most influential intellectuals actively shaping this new climate of learning and sociability – including David Hume, Adam Smith, Lord Kames, Adam Ferguson, John Millar and William Robertson – examined human nature through a broader lens than Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, drawing on history, both conjectural and civil. They provided accounts of which features of our nature or social circumstances explained the historical development and progress of society. How do different forms of government or economy influence the state of learning, the arts, industry and material prosperity? What explains the origin of the ranks of men, and how should the important social categories of rank and sex figure in moral philosophy? Staying with our subject of moral sentiment, I turn to look at the moral views of Hume and Smith, against the backdrop of the concerns, achievements and limits of the theories of Shaftesbury and Hutcheson.

In his Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), Hume advanced an associationist hypothesis to explain how certain key perceptions originate in the mind, including belief, some person-evaluative passions, such as pride and esteem, and the moral sentiments of approbation and blame. The passions of pride and love play a significant role in Hume’s moral theory. These passions are produced through the mind’s tendency to associate together perceptions, either ideas or impressions, that resemble each other. In the passion of pride, for example, an idea or belief about some valued quality as mine resembles the idea of myself produced by pride, which is an idea of myself as advantaged by my valuable quality. Contemplating my valuable quality, let us say it is my courage, produces an impression, a pleasurable perception such as joy, and this pleasure resembles in affective tone the pleasure of pride. We thus have in the production of pride a double association of two related ideas and two related impressions. The double association produces an extra force in the mind’s transition to pride, giving that passion more durability and stability in the mind. The passion of love is produced according to the same principles. Another person’s valuable quality produces in an observer both a pleasure and an idea of her as the possessor of the quality, and these resemble the pleasure of love and an idea of her as the object of love in virtue of her valuable quality.

The moral sentiments arise in a manner analogous to these person-evaluative passions, although they depend on the operation of what Hume calls sympathy.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.