The Evident Connextion is ostensibly about David Hume’s theory of personal identity, but for the serious and patient reader it may serve both as a case study of how and why there was so much interest among early modern philosophers, and the somewhat different motives that lead us to keep revisiting the issue and especially the incredibly famous texts from Hume that are the main topic of discussion here.  Readers who do not yet have their black belt in analytic philosophy may be challenged by Strawson’s style, but he is a good writer and far from parochial with brief but important comments on the role of the brain in the mostly philosophical discussion, how the Phenomenological tradition and the early behaviorists deal  with the phenomenological facts in question here, as well as judicious quotations from recent classical writers such as J. P. Sartre, L. Wittgenstein, William James, Bertrand Russell, and G. Frege.  He also demonstrates grounding in the work of Hume’s eighteenth-century contemporaries and in the whole body of Hume’s writing.

Strawson does not use the term ‘introspection,’ preferring to speak of ‘mental self-examination’ and, following Hume’s usage, the construction of a mental geography of “the secret springs and principles, by which the human mind is actuated in its operations.” (p. 55)    According to Strawson, “Hume does not deny the existence of the mind considered as something more than a series of perceptions.  It’s just that it is impossible to form any notion of its powers and qualities otherwise than from careful and exact experimentation, and the observation of those particular effects, which result from its different circumstances and situations.” (p. 55) This first person empirical inquiry is the central project of all of Hume’s early work.

Before Hume attained his current status as the greatest of British philosophers, he was a special target of the Scottish School when it was dominant, and before that, in his own time, the great work under discussion here was simply and literally ignored.  This book is a contribution to Hume scholarship, but it is more directly a contribution to the continuing investigation into the nature of personal identity, a topic that enjoys most favored question status among professional philosophers.  Hume’s original work was done with the ardor and heat of youth, and he came to regret his original treatment to such a degree that he tried to repair matters in an appendix only in the end to have to admit defeat.

In an amusing and all too true Preface, Strawson tells us the book was essentially complete nearly a decade ago but languished with all the demands of distractions, a delay during which the already immense literature on Hume on personal identity continued to accumulate.   The Acknowledgments express the author’s gratitude but do not provide any details regarding what his colleagues and students are being thanked for.  There is no Introduction, perhaps on the assumption that all possible readers of this book would long since have been introduced to the subject.  Perhaps, but since Strawson sees no hope of refuting his opponents and seeks only to make some dent in the received view of Hume as thinking the mind is just a series of perceptions, it is especially important to be clear about the precise meaning and significance of the primary project.

Originally the British imperial theology was concerned to instill in everyone belief in the existence of God, the immortality of the soul, and the moral economy of the universe as a system of rewards and punishments.

Strawson argues that the bundle theory does not claim that there are no subjects of experience, as many have supposed, or that the mind is just a series of experiences. Hume holds only that the mind’s essence is unknown because we have no sufficient empirical warrant to believe in the existence of a persisting subject, or a mind that is more than a series of experiences (each with its own subject).  In Hume’s new science of man, experiences are connected by a ‘uniting principle’ or ‘bond of union,” but a philosophy that takes a bundle of separate experiences to be the only warranted conception of the mind cannot go on to use that mere association to explain why the mind is constituted as it is, as Hume wishes to do.

An immense number of sermons picked up on one thread or another linking the received principles of the British morality upward to the will of heaven and downward to the quotidian details of life.  The glory of the British divines, as they were called, was in their ethics of belief.  They were at odds with skeptics like Hume on the particular doctrines, but agreed that the whole system had to be evidence-based and that belief always be proportioned to the evidence.  There was to be no leap, no will to believe, no noble lie.  The Bible could be entered as evidence, but only if the foundations were laid with “evidences,” primarily by appeal to prophecy and miracles, that the Bible was best explained as a revelation from God.  Objections to personal identity could undermine expectations of reward and punishment after death, and any weakening of belief in immortality was potentially subversive of the imperial theology.  Conclusion:  the logic chopping of Clarke, Berkeley, Butler, Hume, and the other classic British empiricists is fully commensurate with contemporary analytic philosophy and its methods.  The issues, the methods, and the resulting intellectual growth are the same now as three hundred years ago.  All that differs are the political stakes, and some would claim, not even that.

To understand the mental health or illness of a people, it is necessary to understand their public philosophy from the inside.  It is not necessary to read Strawson to attain such insight; his work, his dent as he calls it, is merely a very good choice of where to begin.

© 2012 David White

David White holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from Cornell University and is associate professor of philosophy at St. John Fisher College.  He is the editor of the Works of Bishop Butler (University of Rochester Press, 2006), and has twice served as president of the professional philosophers’ association of New York State.  His most recent publication is a collection of his poetry.