Death and Character might have more accurately been entitled Impressions and Vivacity. Although death and character are discussed, the majority of this book is dedicated to “more difficult and abstruse” claims concerning Hume’s epistemology. For a philosopher such as Annette Baier who has dedicated so much of her work to the importance of ethics, passions, character, and women the concentration on metaphors such as “impressions” (Hume’s technical term for the immediacy of perception) and their “force and vivacity” seems like a deviation. While her discussion covers the breadth of Hume’s oeuvre, and is continuous with many of her earlier concerns, it is difficult to find the narrative of this book as a whole–perhaps reflective of her own view of Hume in which his life before and after the Treatise of Human Nature is disconnected. It is also not entirely clear whether Baier’s main concerns here are ethical or epistemological or both. Nevertheless, Baier’s sixty some years of patience and attention to reading Hume, as evidenced in this book, duly impress the reader.

The book has two parts: the first six essays are “Easy and Obvious” while the second part (essays 7-13) are “More Difficult and Abstruse.” The first part explores the theme of the book’s title, Death and Character, and is written for a broad audience. The latter is concerned to “combine truth with novelty,” which is of more interest to Hume scholars. Whereas the first part of Baier’s work ties Hume’s reflections on passions and morals (Treatise of Human Nature, books 2-3) to his descriptive account of characters in his History of England, Baier’s latter “frivolous and finical” (ix) part, on the other hand, emphasizes the connections and disconnections inherent in some of Hume’s works (Treatise, book 1, the Appendix, and the two Enquiries)–issues of identity, causation, the disappearance of impressions from Hume’s later work, and the role of vivacity. While still minimally present, death and character are a minor concern in part two.

Every essay in the first part touches on death and character, specifically what kind of character one has at one’s death and what driving passions and purposes lead one to define one’s identity during one’s lifetime. These essays will be of interest to readers who wish to consider how Hume’s ethics and historical writings might work together. To the best of the reviewer’s knowledge, Baier is original in the way she combines these concerns–and in the way that character and emotional development is described utilizing Hume’s historical texts.

In essay 1, “Acting in Character,” Baier shows how Hume describes the characters of Charles I and Cromwell from the English Civil War to disprove the desire+belief explanation of character. For example, passions may not be as simple a combination of desire and belief, for, as Baier writes, “Passions, for Hume, include such things as esteem, respect, contempt, admiration, envy, resentment, despair, worldweariness, antipathy to treachery, love of family and friends, and love of truth, every one of which can show itself in a hundred different ways. Then there are all the passions we come to share by sympathy. Did Cromwell, late in life, come to share by sympathy the distress of his youngest daughter, Elizabeth Claypoole, at the amount of bloodshed her father was responsible for? Did he remember his own threat that he would have Charles beheaded with the crown on his head, and dread the same fate?” (19-20) That is to say, characters can be explained by passions in a way that may be out of character.

Essay 2, “Impersonation, the Very Idea,” complements essay 1 by adding a discussion of identity. Take Henry VIII’s marriage vow of fidelity. Is he the same person who made the vow when he (repeatedly) seeks divorce? This question, from Hume’s History, complements the more abstract Treatise account of personal identity. But this is not Hume’s primary aim in the History, where he speaks of identity when it comes to the impersonation of someone else (in this case, Lambert Simnel and Perkin Warbeck, pretenders to the throne under Henry VII). With regards to Baier’s concern with the character and identity of Henry VIII, she writes, “Henry was a genius at finding casuistic reasons for why unwanted wives should be somehow dispatched, and Hume is astounded at their ingenuity. There is nothing ingenious about the ‘fiction’ Hume credits us all with, in claiming our lives as our own. We are not illegitimate claimants to our own identities. And we cannot divorce ourselves from our own pasts.” (28)

Essay 3, “Hume’s Excellent Hypocrites,” points to the problem of hypocrisy, sincerity, and politeness. During a time of forced conformity to the established religion, for Hume and for Baier, it does not appear to be a problem to pretend to be something you are not. In fact, the more noble one is the more one must pretend “to love the official religion of his country, and such pretense is better, in a monarch, than open adherence to the wrong religion” (54). Hypocrisy, it appears on Baier’s reading, is a Humean virtue.

Essays 4 & 5 provide even more detail with regards to the lives of Cromwell and Bishop Tunstall in light of questions of character, identity, and hypocrisy. The former essay examines why Cromwell refused to become monarch even though it may have been his strongest desire. After having Charles I beheaded, the crown was his for the taking: did Hume see Cromwell as a hypocrite for not taking it? This question points to the problem of death and character, which Hume encapsulates in his summation of Cromwell’s life: “And upon the whole, his character does not appear so extraordinary and unusual by the mixture of so much absurdity with so much penetration, than by his tempering so much violent ambition and such enraged fanaticism with so much regard for justice and humanity” (qtd. on 69). Of course, Hume did not have Ireland in mind when writing these last words. In the latter essay, Baier considers Hume’s ‘religion,’ especially issues of conforming to the established religion. For England, this means Anglicanism, for France, Catholicism. Bishop Tunstal, who “had a great reputation for great integrity,” did not have a problem with professing outwardly to a faith he probably did not believe in. By doing so, he avoided martyrdom.  Not so for Thomas More or Cranmer. Baier claims that Hume “seems to agree with Hobbes that the seeds of religion ‘can never be abolished out of humane nature.’ The best we can do, it seems, is find the least objectionable form of religion, as a sort of inoculation against its more dangerous forms.” (92) An established religion, for both Hobbes and Hume, encourages and aids internal peace. “Hume knew of no states without an established religion, but had he lived to see what happened in the United States, he would have had confirmation of his theory that, if no religion is established, this will increase religious zeal and the proliferation of competing sects.” (94) The bottom line is that religion must “serve morality, not offend against it.” Hume most admired the Quakers for their “value of peaceableness” (98). External conformity, otherwise called hypocrisy, as in the case of Bishop Tunstal, is encouraged in order to have a ‘perfect commonwealth.’

The last essay of the first part, “Hume’s Deathbed Reading,” aptly demonstrates Hume’s deathbed reading. Unafraid of death or expectant of any afterlife, he read Lucian’s “The Downward Journey.” Hume chose to read “comic versions of pagan stories about what happens after death.” (108)

Part 2 of this book, however, tells a different story. In essay 7, Baier states that impressions are metaphors, and most of Hume’s descriptions of the mind, even more than earlier attempts such as “Plato’s, Aristotle’s, Hobbes’s, Descartes’, Malebranche’s, Locke’s.” In this chapter, death does surface, for a moment: “As for death, witnessing another’s death gives on a very vivid impression of the transition of living body to corpse, and, through sympathy, some idea and impression of what the dying person felt. But only an approximation. The impression of dying, if there is one, is felt only by the dying…” (127) At stake is her playing down Hume’s copy principle (disagreeing with Hume scholars Marina Frasca-Spada, Don Garrett, and David Landy), replacing it with that of an impression “that not merely touches but grabs the soul.” (138)

Essay 8 contributes to Hume’s view of impression by means of degrees of vivacity. Baier criticizes Hume for not taking vivacity enough into account when it comes to personal identity. If he had, he may have attributed, he may have learned from others that  “The closest Hume comes to allowing the vivacity of other people’s perceptions influences the vivacity of mine is in his claim that every pleasure languishes if not enjoyed in company, that we need others to ‘second’ our passions, for them to last.” (162) Vivacity transfer, however, appears to end in death, since there is no taking over our parents’ vivacity of impressions.

Essay 9 enters even deeper into the labyrinth of Humean epistemology and philosophy of mind, or in Hume’s terms ‘anatomy fof the mind.’ In the appendix and in book III of the Treatise, Hume stopped using the language of vivacity, which gets him into deep water if not a dead end. If Hume had written a 2^nd edition of the Treatise, he may have found his way out of the labyrinth by knowing causes without having to have “impressions of those causes”–or he may have proceeded “to look at these causal vivacity dependencies within the series of one’s past and present perceptions, see how beliefs sometimes but not always involve impressions as the source of their inherited vivacity, reassure oneself of the efficacy of constant conjunctions to in past impressions to cause a vivacious feeling of necessity in any causal inference, and so arrive at the path one entered by, and be free.” (204)

Essay 10 asks the question of Hume that, if we were to hear a voice in the next room, might we recognize and form beliefs about who the voice is coming from? The difference between the Treatise  and the first Enquiry point to (not only subtle but crucial) differences in Hume’s analysis of causation and belief (not to mention identity), the most important of which for Baier is the dropping of the language of impressions and vivacity from his later “post-impressionist” work. Thus, it is difficult to form beliefs regarding who is in the next room by means of the later Hume.

Essay 11 provides an examination of causation and how, in Hume’s 2 definitions of a cause in the Treatise, he needed to adapt his theory in order to take into account gravitation and mental attraction–both of these latter theories were problematic for Hume’s discussion of contiguity. In the first Enquiry, unlike his earlier treatment, he replaced vicinity and vivacity with conjunction by imagination–the power and energy of which may not be conscious to us.

Essay 12 outlines the major changes between the Treatise, the Enquiries and the Dissertation on the Passions, showing the bankruptcy of the latter works. “As Hume aged, he became less Protestant and individualistic, not only in his epistemology, but also in his social philosophy…But the Treatise epistemology, imbedded as it is in Hume’s theory of how vivacity is transferred from impressions to beliefs based on them, has an internal coherence lacking in [the first Enquiry].” (243) Nothing truly replaces the role of impressions and vivacity in Hume’s later work. There are remnants, however: “of vivacity all that remains is one enlivening, one transfusion, and the attendance of lively passions on a lively imagination” (249) But “impressions as master-perceptions,” on which the entire Treatise is based, disappear entirely in the Enquiries. Essay 13, “Why Hume Asked Us Not to Read the Treatise,” explains why Hume thought the Treatise just not good enough, but Baier still suggests we read it in place of the later works.

In Hume’s History of England, he assessed a monarch’s character with a paragraph labeled “death and character,” in which he stated his overarching judgment of how history perceives the deceased figure. One can only sum up a person’s life, or a book read, in retrospect, even though some of this summation is evident earlier. In the conclusion to her book, Baier returns to the “easy and obvious” subject of death and character by giving Hume’s Curriculum Vitae according to himself (entitled ‘My Own Life’), and by trying to show the coherence and narrative structure of Hume’s own literary life. According to this reviewer, some of the ethical concerns in Baier’s book, such as character traits, are subsumed into the epistemological. In other words, whereas Baier’s earlier work helped us understand the continuity of epistemology, passions, and morals–as well as the narrative structure of the Treatise itself–now it appears epistemology gets the last word. For the narrative of this book, it feels like two different books, one on death and character, and one on impressions and vivacity. But as seen in Cromwell’s strongest desire to rule, or Henry VIII’s for an heir, overarching patterns emerge in Baier’s personal anecdotes, which point to her earlier prejudice for the epistemological (e.g. 114n3). There may be a narrative after all, in which the beginning and the ending are linked. In sum, her maturity of scholarship and her life-long overarching passion for David Hume bear remarkable fruit in Death and Character.

 

© 2009 Michael Funk Deckard

 

Michael Funk Deckard is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Lenoir-Rhyne University (North Carolina)

Keywords: philosophycd