by Wendy Lesser
Part Two
ON NOT WRITING
ABOUT DAVID HUME
There is always something sad about a book that doesn't see the light of day. It has about it the ghostly, lurid, frightening quality of those formaldehyde-filled jars of deformed fetuses and other anatomical grotesqueries that one sees in old movies about mad scientists. It reeks of the unborn and the undead, inhabiting that shadowy middle ground between things that actually exist and things that were never conceived of. Failure, hopelessness, and even a kind of shame cling to its unseen pages. This can be true even of a book that has been fully written but lives its entire life in an author's desk drawer. In that case, though, there is always the possibility that a resurrection may still take place: after the author dies, or even before, the manuscript pages may escape from their coffin and be transmuted into the bound pages of a published volume. But if the book has never even been written, there is no hope for it at all.
I had such a book; or perhaps I should say I have it still, for the book that never gets written never gets finished, either. Mine was, or is, about the philosopher David Hume.
When I first announced to my editor—a man who was himself trained in philosophy, though he has long since put it aside—that I wanted to write a short, lively, accessible critical biography of Hume, his response was surprisingly enthusiastic. My editor seemed to understand exactly why I found Hume so congenial. He also felt (or perhaps it was I who felt, with his tacit agreement) that Hume's time had come at last: his philosophical ideas were ripe for application to the world we now inhabit, and their humane, intelligent usefulness might even appeal to the general reading public. We were going to call the book A Philosopher for Our Time, or possibly Hume Our Contemporary, and while neither of us thought it would necessarily make any money, we both viewed it as a worthy project.
Simply having discussed the book in this way made me feel that I had practically written it—at any rate, that it was well on its way toward being a book. I am not the sort of writer or indeed the sort of person who has a lot of unfinished projects lying around, and I am generally very quick (sometimes, perhaps, too quick) to bring my projects to completion. So it seemed only a matter of time, once I had had this discussion, before the little critical biography would be out. Filled with the sense of purpose that always accompanies these beginning stages, I rushed out to buy as many books by and about David Hume as I could affordably lay hands on.
I already had quite a few David Hume books sitting on my shelves—mainly those little yellow paperbacks put out by Bobbs-Merrill, like David Hume: Philosophical Historian or Of the Standard of Taste and Other Essays, but also random volumes from the Treatise of Human Nature and the Enquiries. These volumes had all been acquired more than a quarter of a century earlier when I first encountered Hume, initially and briefly in two college courses, and then more seriously during a Cambridge term spent studying “Moralists” (that being the word the Leavis-influenced Cambridge English faculty used to refer to its Tripos exam in philosophy). The philosophers covered ranged from Aristotle to Freud. My tutor, John Casey, was widely known for his eccentric conservatism and his staunch misogyny, but neither of these qualities interfered with our tutorials, during which we engaged in lively debates about Aristotle's concept of the great man, Kant's categorical imperative, and other light-hearted topics.
Alone among the philosophers we read, Hume instantly struck me as a kindred figure, someone to be carried through life as a sort of talisman against nonsense. He was so specific, so visceral in his approach, that I found myself drawn to his examples and thought processes even when I wanted to argue with them. I remember, for instance, being in the midst of the cold, gray, landlocked Cambridge winter and happening upon Hume's assertion that one cannot be proud of the Pacific Ocean (because pride entails possession, or at least intimate connection, and no one, obviously, can own the Pacific Ocean). A Californian in exile, I responded to these words with a rush of feeling for the Pacific Ocean, a sudden sense of how much I missed its western-facing sunsets, its tide-pooled shores inhabited by sea lions and sea otters, even its dangerous rocks and undertows. If this was not pride, it was as close to it as I could imagine feeling, and I was grateful to Hume for the evocative experience, even if it seemed to contradict the point he was trying to make.
I barely read a word of Hume after 1975, but somehow I retained a sense that he was my philosopher (rather in the way the Pacific Ocean was my ocean), a vast reserve on whom I could draw for sustenance as needed. He represented, for me, a common-sense view of the world, a down-to-earth answer to lofty abstractions, an adherence to the tangible and the everyday. It did not hurt that he was Scottish, since Edinburgh was one of the first European cities I had ever lived in, and the first I had fallen in love with. Best of all, Hume was an agnostic, or possibly even an atheist—at any rate, an anti-religious figure whose philosophy dispensed entirely with the need for a God.
This last is actually what brought me back to him in 2002. I can remember the moment exactly. I was sitting in the audience of the San Francisco Opera's production of Saint François d'Assise, the American premiere of Olivier Messiaen's starkly religious masterwork. It was a much-heralded, much-praised opera, and even I could see that it was very well done. But I was not enjoying myself. It was not just the music's unyielding modernism that put me off; though it's true that I'm a Handel/ Rossini kind of person, I can easily be won over by a good performance of, say, Berg's Lulu. What made me so distinctly uncomfortable, in this case, was the life-defying religious sensibility that suffused the piece. The St. Francis who lived in my imagination (put there, no doubt, by his associations with my local metropolis) was a rather pleasant fellow who liked animals, but Messiaen's version was a much more ascetic figure, an aspiring martyr who wanted to feel pain, a man who longed to suffer agonies comparable to the crucifixion so he could prove and intensify his love of God. I felt innately antagonistic to this whole distaste-for-the-body routine, and as I cast about for an alternative mode of thought (the opera was five hours long and sometimes the notes were few and far between, so there was a lot of room for alternative modes of thought), I recalled the pleasure-loving, rational-minded David Hume. It was at that moment that I decided to write a book about him.
Philosophers of intentionality have argued over whether the verb “decided to” can be used about an action that did not reach completion. If you didn't carry through on the decision, then you didn't really decide to do it was Gilbert Ryle's line—not in so many words, but that's what he meant, with his disparaging remarks about ghost-in-the-machine dualism and phantom actions. But Bernard Williams begged to disagree. There's a wonderful passage in his Shame and Necessity where he talks about a man who “decides” to abandon his mistress and go back to his wife, and then finds he can't live with that decision. Did he decide, or not? Bernard's worldview was subtle enough, and his experience of such moments visceral enough, that he could see the ambiguities in the situation; to his mind, it was possible to arrive at a decision that was invisible to an external observer and that resulted in no tangible outcome. I did, in that sense, decide to write a book about David Hume. Perhaps more to the point, I never decided not to write it. It's just that the book failed, over time, to emerge.
But the word “failed” makes the process sound too flaccid, too inactive and weak. I grappled, over the years, with this not writing about David Hume. Wherever I went, I would ship a boxload of Hume books—or, if it made more sense, check ten or twelve of them out on long-term loan from the local university library. Not writing about David Hume required the presence of David Hume books on my shelves: they had to be in clear view, overseeing the process of my not writing. Sometimes I even read them, or read in them, to rediscover what I was not writing about.
If you have ever come across a book by Geoff Dyer called Out of Sheer Rage, you will perhaps detect something familiar in my methodology. One of Dyer's two most brilliant books (the other, I think, is his recent one about p
hotography), Out of Sheer Rage is about not writing about D. H. Lawrence. Dyer, too, schleps his research materials from country to country, only to find himself not using them. He too has a deep affinity with his subject and nothing much to show for it (except a few piercing paragraphs, scattered here and there within the book, that say more about Lawrence than most of the rest of the critical literature combined). And he too can't quite bear just to let the project go.
But Geoff Dyer and I are very different sorts of writers, and our ways of not doing something couldn't be more unlike. He specializes in torpor, in passive avoidance, in laziness carried to excess. Lying in bed reading Out of Sheer Rage (I was suffering from back problems at the time), I found his description of an average “writing” day—most of it spent lounging around in his bathrobe, occasionally in front of the TV—so oppressively convincing that I had to crawl out of bed and pay a few bills, just to make sure the contagion hadn't affected me. My own tendency in the avoidance department is to err on the side of frenzy and over-exertion. It is very easy for me to fill up my day with small, necessary, immediate tasks that prevent me from even thinking about David Hume, let alone writing about him. I would seem, in this sense, to be singularly unsuited to writing a book about a man who specialized in lengthy, quiet periods of thought and other sedentary enjoyments, such as eating, talking, and card-playing. Perhaps I would have done better to choose a more frenzied character, like D. H. Lawrence. And Geoff Dyer probably would have known better than I do how to grapple with David Hume's relative stillness.
I am speaking of Dyer-on-the-page, Dyer as he presents himself in his nonfiction books. When I eventually met Geoff Dyer, he turned out to be nothing like that narrator, or at least only sufficiently like him to prevent my having suspicions about plagiarism or ghost writing. I had learned that Dyer was to be in San Francisco, and so I had offered, sight unseen and purely on the basis of my affection for his writing, to take him out to lunch at the fanciest restaurant in my neighborhood. Then I had doubts. Would the boorish malcontent described in Out of Sheer Rage be able to sustain the decorum needed for a fancy restaurant? Would he even be able to sit up straight in his chair for as long as a lunch? In the event, these doubts proved groundless, for Geoff Dyer the person proved to be an attractive, well-spoken Englishman with impeccable restaurant manners. I should not have been surprised. The person and the writer are never exactly alike, even when the writing purports to be nonfiction.
Perhaps this is what began to worry me about my David Hume project as well. Which had I been attracted to, the person or the writer? Well, the writer, obviously—I knew very little about the person when I set out to do the book. But why, then, was I proposing to do a biography? And what possible light, in any case, could a biographical study shed on the philosophical writing? Often, I can't even explain the connections between my own life and my own essays; how could I expect to do so for a total stranger who had lived over two hundred years earlier in a far-away place?
Actually, the far-away place was part of the appeal. I had hopes of visiting Edinburgh again. It would be a tax-deductible visit, possibly even a grant-subsidized visit, a journey that would be converted from a fanciful holiday jaunt to a necessary research trip by virtue of my David Hume book. My first trip to Edinburgh, at the age of twenty, had been for the ostensible purpose of doing research on the Scottish city planner Patrick Geddes, the subject of my undergraduate thesis. I had fond memories of sitting in the Guildhall Library reading manuscripts and typescripts from the Geddes archive, and even fonder memories of exploring the city's streets and byways, its stunning vistas and ancient closes, its parks and promenades, its classically rectangular New Town and medievally twisty Old Town, all jumbled together in one walkable, learnable, livable city. When I thought up my David Hume project, I must have imagined that somehow I could transport myself back to that youthful period of discovery. Even more crazily I imagined that the Edinburgh I could visit in the twenty-first century and the one Hume had occupied in the eighteenth retained sufficient elements in common for me to glean some clues about how and why he had become the kind of philosopher he was.
Perhaps I am just not biographer material. Real biographers (most notably Richard Holmes) actually do this following-in-the-footsteps thing and make it work for them. But I know damn well that if I visited the plaque on the wall marking David Hume's last residence in the New Town, it would only make me feel more hopelessly inept at capturing either his personality or his ideas. Even reading the other biographies of him made me feel that way. The more I learned about David Hume, the less I could get any kind of handle on him.
The basic outline is clear enough. He was born in Edinburgh in 1711 and grew up at Ninewells, the family estate in Berwickshire; he died, also in Edinburgh, in 1776. In between he attended Edinburgh College as a teenager, wrote his first (and eventually most influential) book of philosophy before the age of twenty-six, and worked for a while as an aide to a high-ranking military figure, during which time he traveled extensively through Europe. Though Scotland was his home for most of his life, he spent brief periods in London and one longish interval in Paris, where he served as the official secretary to the British ambassador, and where his reputation as both a philosopher and a historian brought him numerous French admirers. He never married, but he had at least one intense flirtation, possibly more epistolary than actual, with a highly intelligent Frenchwoman of the haut monde; some sources also think he seduced one of the local Ninewells girls in his youth, but there is no firm evidence for that. He befriended or was befriended by Adam Smith, James Boswell, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and other noteworthy figures of his time. He practiced surreptitious acts of charity throughout his life, often putting his own hard-earned money and reputation toward the support of needier writers, but without letting them know he was behind the helpful efforts. As a matter of principle (there had been a disagreement, and his strong recommendation had not been heeded), he gave up a comfortable position at the Edinburgh law library at a time when he very much needed the resources it provided; from that time on he lived mainly on his writing. His anti-clericalism made him a bit of a black sheep in certain Edinburgh circles, but his manners were so charming and his conversation so entertaining that even the stiff-necked Scottish Presbyterians broke down and invited him to their homes. He died without reneging on his lifelong agnosticism: when Boswell asked him on his deathbed if he did not now believe that a future state was possible, “He answered that it was possible that a piece of coal put upon a fire would not burn,” and as to whether the thought of annihilation made him uneasy, “He said not the least; no more than the thought that he had not been, as Lucretius observes.” Among his friends and acquaintances, the adjective that most frequently accompanied his name was “good.”
I liked this man. He would be excellent company, I felt, and would repay all the close attention I was planning to give him. But even at this purely biographical phase— before I ever dared to crack open the horrendously dense and often self-contractictory philosophical essays—I could see that David Hume was not the coherent, consistent package he initially seemed to be. There was, for instance, that odd sentence attributed to his mother: “Our Davie's a fine good-natur'd cratur, but uncommon weak-minded.” What could this possibly mean when applied to the most brilliant man of his generation, if not, indeed, his century? Did the family really fail to perceive his intelligence? Did they, in some perverse way, view all this book-reading and thought-experimenting and treatise-producing as some kind of fool's errand?
Or did the phrase “weak-minded“ refer instead to Hume's mental fragility, his tendency to break down after too much work? There does seem to have been a breakdown of sorts in the early 1730s, just after a long, strenuous period spent developing the ideas that were to emerge in the Treatise of Human Nature. We have as evidence a letter he wrote in 1734 to a specialist in London, piteously (and anonymously) detailing his symptoms, which included a watery mouth, a slight rash, a surge in appetite,
an unaccustomed laziness, an inability to read or think consecutively, and a constant vacillation between idle melancholy and nervous exhaustion. Hume recovered from this episode of his youth, but he was never quite the same person afterward: where he had once been lean, rawboned, and rather pale, he was now increasingly portly and inclined to a ruddy cheerfulness.
But perhaps weak-minded did not, in eighteenth-century Scotland, mean what we now take it to mean. Some Scottish commentators have suggested that what his mother actually said was “wake-minded,” which in the local dialect may have signified that he was smart, quick, alight with intelligence. This is, after all, reported speech rather than writing, so it could well have been misheard. Or perhaps she used the phrase sardonically, ironically, as Scots—now as then—are so wont to do, implying the exact opposite of what was explicitly said. Or maybe she never spoke these words at all, and the sentence is just part of the cultural effluvia, the originary myth, that is bound to arise around the shadowy childhood of any subsequently prominent figure. From this distance, we have no way of discriminating among all the possibilities, no way of deciding which comes closest to the truth.
Seeking out the singular and everlasting truth is not, in any case, a project with which David Hume himself would have had much sympathy. He was, in that sense, the opposite of a Platonist or a Kantian (to the extent, I mean, that Kant himself was a Platonist). He did not believe that the Truth was somewhere “out there,” located in supernatural territory and accessible to us only through otherworldly communications. He did not think of truth as a pre-existing, permanent, capitalized phenomenon at all. To Hume, it seemed clear that truths (and they were always multiple) arose under specific circumstances and applied to specific circumstances. One arrived at them only through observation: of oneself, of one's own thought processes, of the world around one, of the historical record.
