J O S E P H C. P I T T

PROBLEMATICS

IN T H E H I S T O R Y OF P H I L O S O P H Y

Marjorie Grene has been a member of our department at Virginia Tech for only a short while and yet it is hard to imagine a time when she was not. Not only has her energy inspired us, and often exhausted us, but her interests complement the interests of so many of us that this place in particular seems to be especially fitting for her. Since we are a department heavily weighted with historians, her long-standing concerns about how to do the history of philos0phy makes her a natural addition to our group. Her views in this area are of immediate import since many of us in the department also participate in an interdisciplinary program in the history, philosophy and sociology of science. As might be expected, a major topic of concern in those circles is how best to use the various disciplinary approaches to complement one another so as to illuminate the issues under discussion. Her strong views on historical methodology put Marjorie right into the middle of those discussions, in many cases forcing a reconsideration of issues we thought long settled, and all to good results. By way of appreciation for all that reconsidering, for many hours of provocative discussion, with many thanks for 'tons' of proof-reading and good-natured jibes about rampant pragmatism, I offer the following brief considerations on a historiographical issue, with an open apology to Marjorie for the pragmatic twist. Marjorie Grene begins her marvelous book on Descartes with some comments on the unfortunate consequences of doing Whiggish history of philosophy. Her complaint in brief, is that "much that has been written recently, especially on Descartes and especially in E n g l i s h . . . is so narrowly confined to the terms of the late twentieth-century debate that the real Descartes is simply left aside altogether" (Grene 1985, p. 3). For Marjorie, the proper role of historical philosophy is subtly different. In her view, "we w~mt on the one hand to put our questions into historical context and on the other to illuminate history, to comprehend and criticize the arguments of dead philosophers in the light of what seems to us live issues here and now". The illumination of history comes from two directions. With respect to Descartes, it requires careSynthese 92: 117-134, 1992. © 1992 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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ful attention to what he actually said and to what Marjorie refers to as 'the problematic of the seventeenth century' (Grene 1985, p. 3). I agree with both of these. But the addition of Marjorie's third desideratum, that we (1) not only put our question into the historical context, and (2) illuminate history, but (3) engage the past in the light of live contemporary issues, creates a tension in Grenean historiography. It is true that in our efforts to historize, and thereby legitimize, contemporary philosophical concerns, we often lose the historical fact of the matter or the context of the debate. But it is also not easy both to illuminate history in Marjorie's sense, by comprehending and criticizing the arguments of a dead philosopher in the light of current live issues, and to do justice to the work of that philosopher in his own terms and in terms of the problematic of the period. There are, as one might guess, several reasons for my uneasiness about what I will call the Grene Historiographical Program, but the one on which I wish to concentrate concerns the difficulties of identifying, in any significant way, the problematic of a particular century or period. To say that it is difficult is not to deny that it is possible. Nor is it to deny the importance of attempting to do so for the purpose of understanding what the individual under scrutiny was up to. Thus, despite my pointing out tensions among the various desiderata of the Grene Historiographical Program, my ultimate goal is to elaborate and extend it. In this respect, the suggestions and criticism offered here are supportive of that program and rest on the commitment that it is both possible and important to carry it out. Marjorie is absolutely correct when she claims that one cannot understand a historical figure without understanding the intellectual motivations of the period in which he or she is working. On the other hand, it is not clear how one accomplishes that rather daunting task. How does one identify the problems and irritations to which any given philosopher may be responding? Even if we have autobiographical evidence that reports an individual's efforts to handle an issue first developed by so-and-so, it doesn't follow that that is really what was motivating the writer. Take, for example, the case of Galileo and the composition of his Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems, which took place over a period of fourteen years between 1616 and 1630, with publication finally occurring in 1632, and condemnation in 1633. The common view is that he wrote it as a defense of Copernicus. My own research indicates that that was a secondary consideration at best. The main reasons for

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producing the work involve a complicated combination of three different factors. First, it provided Galileo with the opportunity to develop a detailed justification for his own views on scientific method; second, given the encouragement he had received with respect to his Reply to Ignoli, it provided him with a further opportunity to ingratiate himself to the Catholic Church by demonstrating that the specifics of Copernicus' views were well known in Italy and that the church's ban on the teaching of Copernicus' theory was not based on ignorance of that theory; and, finally, in completing the Dialogue, he took advantage of the opportunity to present his theory of the tides, a project on which he had been working since 1616, based on ideas he developed as early as 1595. How do all these factors play off of one another? Was Galileo even conscious of some of them? Was there a primary motivation? I doubt it. Material can be cited giving each of them credibility, but it is not clear if a case can be made showing definitively that one provided the prime motivation.1 Does our failure to identify a prime motive for Galileo mean that any effort to identify something like a problematic that a philosopher could be responding to is doomed? No, that is too strong a conclusion. The problem context that motivates a thinker is not wholly unknowable. Progress can be and is being made. For example, earlier assumptions concerning the governing role of certain presumed problematics of the participants in the Scientific Revolution are evaporating in the light of detailed historical analysis of their lives and times. Employing a number of simplifying and unifying assumptions, early historians of the Scientific Revolution characterized the motivation for the development of non-traditional research programs by individuals such as Galileo and Kepler in terms of the need - read "problematic" - to develop an alternative to Aristotle's set of analytic categories for the investigation of natural phenomena. More recent scholarship not only reveals that the cast of characters is larger than previously reported, but that things were not so simple as all that. Attempting to explain some of the historiographic shifts in work on the Scientific Revolution, Lindberg and Westman (1990, pp. xviii-xix) note that: History of science was beginning to be transformed into an encampment of specialists. Specialization brought with it an impatience with conceptual vignettes and broadly brushstroked stories; the new historians focused instead on "aspects" or "periods" of intellectual evolution, on "discovery," and especially on elements previously marginalized by

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too exclusive attention to the Greats. While academic presses continued to provide undergraduates with the older histories, the same learned presses joined the specialist journals in producing highly focused studies that took root and began subtly to undermine the wall on which Humpty-Dumpty sat. Among many examples that could be offered, a few must suffice to hint at the range and depth of this shift in historiographic sensibility. First came the problem of integrating newly discovered personae with the old characters. If the Scientific Revolution was fundamentally a rethinking of metaphysical categories such as motion, space, and time, how could one square this view with archival evidence that seemed to reveal that Galileo had conducted actual experiments with inclined planes? If Isaac Newton's genius lay first in finding a "mathematical way" to universal gravitation and then extending that to chemical reactions and phenomena of cohesion and capillarity, how could that achievement be situated within his voluminous alchemical writings, exegeses of the Book of Daniel, and sacred and secular chronologies? Did Newton regard the Prineipia as but a small part of a project to uncover all of nature's secrets, or was he a "skeptical alchemist," resigned to uncovering what he could from an ancient tradition? Studies of Johannes Kepler, by contrast, more easily reconciled conflicting elements of his thought. The new scholarship showed, variously, that Kepler was not the deeply bifurcated thinker (empiricist and mystic) portrayed in the traditional literature but rather a man seeking natural harmonies throughout the creation. Yet it was still the old Kepler who provided the planetary laws essential to the classic Newton of the Principia, not the well-rounded Kepler constructed by the new history of science.

This suggests that it is not impossible to identify a problematic, but to do so requires a different approach than has been employed. My main point is that identifying such a problematic may not be possible if one uses the methods one would employ in analyzing what the individual actually said. This becomes clear if we distinguish (i) explicating the text from (ii) assessing its significance. The determination of a problematic only becomes important when we are attempting to make a case for the significance of a particular theme or philosophical accomplishment. Furthermore, a problematic can be identified only by both looking backward and forward in time. We look backward because we can only determine what the problematic is for a given individual, say Descartes, by way of identifying the concerns to which his work constitutes either a response or an elaboration. We look forward in time because it is highly probable that when the individual in question is developing his response or elaborating upon some earlier view, his own deep and ultimately motivating concerns may not be fully articulate. Problematics move from being vague and incoherent irritations to providing the context for full-scale research agendas over time and often by means of working through and out of older problems that simply may be misidentified as roadblocks. On this account one could also say that Descartes was not a Cartesian; that is, we could say this in the light of

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what came to be known as Cartesian over the next one hundred years. In claiming that Descartes was not a Cartesian, we help focus on two points: (i) the developing historical character of problematics and (ii) how Descartes himself shifted the problem context he encountered. Finally, no matter what concerns motivate thinkers in the directions they take, the fact of the matter is that we all have to start in our own present with the problems that have been handed to us. My problematic may turn out to be very different from my teacher's, despite the fact that my first research projects are a direct function of what he taught me. Furthermore, it may take me some time to work my way through the problems he left me with until I get to the point where I am in a position to work on what I can now identify as my own concerns. The identification of a problematic also requires looking forward in time, because if it is truly a problematic of the kind Grene wants to talk about, a problematic of a period or a century, then it will set the stage for the work of later thinkers. And by seeing what they do with it we not only get a better handle on the nature of the problematic itself, but we shall be in a better position to assess its significance in the history of philosophy. By way of example, therefore, let us look at the problem of assessing the significance of Descartes' epistemology of ideas. The strong version of my thesis is that only by placing Descartes' views in something like a conceptual tradition can the significance of his epistemological work be understood. There is no doubt that the identification of a conceptual tradition is an artifact of reason, a construction after the fact, but it is only after the fact that the significance of any historical figure can be determined. This is done by considering the effects of Descartes' arguments as they function in the views of those who followed him. 2 Thus, I want to argue that we need H u m e or someone like H u m e to understand the significance of Descartes' approach to knowledge. Why H u m e ? One important reason is that Hume, like Descartes, bases his epistemology on the theory of ideas. But his problematic is not Descartes'. The problematic has shifted and by noting the shift, we come to understand more about Descartes. Only by playing Descartes' views off against those of an appropriate successor can we see the significance of what he did. It is not enough to look at the past, for the past can at most tell you only what came before. That in itself may be interesting. But the determination of the full significance of a philosopher's view requires seeing what followed from his innovations and insights. It is impossible to understand the significance of

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Descartes' work or to obtain a full appreciation of the context in which he labored without seeing the kind of response his views generated and knowing where that response itself led. This perspective is, thus, most usefully served by examining the views of those who take a stance against, but also amplify parts of, the transformed problematic as their assumptions. Fleshed out, this obvious truth leads us also to recognize that there is a sense then in which one must first know the whole before one can understand the significance of the parts - one must first know the future before we can assess the significance of the past. Now this is not as outrageous as it appears. Knowledge of the factors I have been identifying simply expand our understanding of how it is possible to say of Descartes that he is the father of modern philosophy. He functions in that capacity because we interpret the work of philosophers coming after him as responding to or elaborating the philosophical agenda he set. Thus, if the key to understanding Descartes is, as Marjorie tells us, his method, and if, as she continues, "Descartes's method was indeed, as Locke, misunderstanding it almost altogether, yet rightly called it, a 'new way of ideas'" (Grene 1985, pp. 5-6), then, since Hume, in setting his own agenda, must first undermine the epistemology of ideas, we must l o o k t o Hume to understand the significance of Descartes' new way of ideas. Before turning to Hume, however, I should note that Marjorie employs something along this methodological line in her Descartes when by way of conclusion she turns to the work of J. J. Gibson. According to Marjorie we not only need Gibson's views to extract us from the dead-end Cartesian legacy that bedevils our understanding of perception, but we need Descartes to appreciate the significance of Gibson's accomplishment. With regard to the first, I am in complete agreement, Gibson or maybe Hume; but with regard to the second, I say we need to wait to see if anything happens with Gibson's views. Regardless, we still need Descartes to understand Gibson, and we need Gibson's followers and critics to understand both him and Descartes, as Marjorie has shown us. Let us turn now to what some might consider the implausible case I would like to make on behalf of our need of Hume (or someone like him) to understand Descartes' problematic. We are all more than familiar with the introductory lines of the First Meditation in which Descartes (1641) lays out his agenda. Some years ago I was struck by the large number of falsehoods that I had accepted as

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true in my childhood, and by the highly doubtful nature of the whole edifice that I had subsequently based on them. I realized that it was necessary, once in the course of my life, to demolish everything completely and start again right from the foundations if I wanted to establish anything at all in the sciences that was stable and likely to last. (Descartes 1984, p. 12)

The procedure he follows is, as we all know, to reject systematically all opinions susceptible to doubt as he searches for that of which he can be certain for use as his foundation. He locates the cogito, proves the existence of God, and then catalogues the various contents of the human mind, ordering them in terms of their reliability and the roles they play in the mosaic of human knowledge. In short, given Descartes' emphasis on human beings as thinking things, one could read the Meditations as Descartes' science of man. In that science, it is clear that further progress in other sciences depends on achieving a high degree of success in understanding how the human mind works and why and when it is to be relied upon in matters scientific. But what kind of man is this? A disembodied mind? Hardly the stuff of real life. It is a strange philosophical artifact that Descartes creates here, only barely recognizable; indeed, without our prior acquaintance with the real thing, Descartes' portrayal would fail completely. What then was Descartes attempting? What problem was he addressing that in his solution he could tolerate such an unintuitive characterization of a human being? Well, for one thing, it is clear that human beings as such are not the topic of Descartes' inquiry. The subject is knowledge and how to secure its foundations so t h a t the knowing subject can act rationally. This was Descartes' problematic. Descartes' concern with the contents and organization of the human mind as the foundation for knowledge was itself a response to the corrupt versions of Aristotelian epistemology favored at seventeenth-century universities. More specifically, the motivation for Descartes' concentration on the contents of the human mind as the source of certainty can be seen as a rejection of the more standard epistemology of his day, the seventeenth-century scholastics' advocacy of the priority of abstract first principles in the justification of epistemic claims. Descartes was one of the. first modern philosophers to make the knower a major factor in epistemology by making the certainty which is the mark of knowledge a direct function of the human mind, rather than of abstract first principles and logic. This is not to deny that the knower plays a crucial role in Aristotelian-styled scholastic epistemol-

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ogy. The emphasis is different. For Descartes, it is some of the content of the human mind itself which makes knowledge possible, whereas for the scholastics the main contribution of the knower was the application of principles of reasoning to self-justifying first principles. But it was a strange knower, disembodied and without all those other features of human psychology which make the real live creature so interesting. There is a certain tradition in the history of philosophy that has Hume, like Descartes, primarily motivated by the epistemological problematic posed by Descartes as he attempted to shift attention from scholastic first principles to ideas. In this tradition, Locke and Hume (sometimes Berkeley) are portrayed as engaged in working out an empiricist version of the epistemology of ideas. Hume is interpreted as helping to illuminate the nature and magnitude of the problems associated with the ideas approach to knowledge while at the same time attempting to overcome those problems from a strict empiricist point of view. And while that interpretation of Hume has merit, I think it is basically mistaken. On the other hand, there is no denying that Hume had to work his way through the epistemology of ideas. That, however, does not mean Hume was positively engaged in Descartes' version of the problematic of the theory of ideas. I read him as reacting to it and rejecting it on the road to elucidating a different problematic. That problematic would be to put the rest of the human being, the part Descartes eliminated as irrelevant, back into epistemology. Furthermore, as we examine how Hume proposed to accomplish that we cannot help but develop a more focused understanding of Descartes' problematic. For as we explore the scope of Hume's expanded horizon, we find it easier to identify and appreciate the narrowness of Descartes' context. Descartes was concerned with establishing the foundation of scientific knowledge in terms of the contents and judgments of the thinking human mind. Hume, on the other hand, was concerned to show that knowledge so construed provided little by way of motivation or justification for action. Hume was concerned with the problem of understanding the causes of human action. His conclusion is that on the epistemology of ideas, it cannot be knowledge. Human beings are motivated to act by the passions, products of that very part of human beings Descartes ignored. Compare Hume's remarks in the much neglected introduction to his Treatise of Human Nature.

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'Tis evident, that all the sciences have a relation, greater or less, to human nature; and that however wide any of them seem to run from it, they still return back by one passage or another. Even Mathematics, Natural Philosophy, and Natural Religion, are in some measure dependent on the science of Man; since they lie under the cognizance of men, and are judged by their powers and faculties. (Hume 1888, p. xix) S h o r t l y t h e r e a f t e r H u m e m a k e s an e v e n s t r o n g e r claim. There is no question of importance, whose decision is not compriz'd in the science of man; "and there is none, which can be decided with any certainty, before we become acquainted with that science. In pretending therefore to explain the principles of human nature, we in effect propose a complete system of the sciences, built on a foundation almost entirely new, and the only one upon which they can stand with any security. (Ibid., p. xx) Both the tone and the objective echo Descartes. Both Descartes and H u m e l o c a t e t h e f o u n d a t i o n s o f t h e sciences in t h e p r i n c i p l e s of h u m a n n a t u r e . T h e s e c u r e f o u n d a t i o n t h e y b o t h s e e k is to c o m e f r o m a n e w u n d e r s t a n d i n g o f w h a t it is to b e h u m a n a n d h o w it is t h a t h u m a n s c o m e to h a v e k n o w l e d g e . N o w it is also t r u e t h a t t h e r e a r e s o m e g l a r i n g differences. W h e r e D e s c a r t e s claims to h a v e d i s c o v e r e d t h e e s s e n c e o f b e i n g h u m a n in b e i n g a t h i n k i n g thing, H u m e d e c l a r e s t h e v e r y s e a r c h for an e s s e n c e o r for s o m e u l t i m a t e p r i n c i p l e o f h u m a n n a t u r e to b e p o i n t l e s s . T h u s he claims, " a n y h y p o t h e s i s , t h a t p r e t e n d s to d i s c o v e r t h e u l t i m a t e o r i g i n a l qualities o f h u m a n n a t u r e , o u g h t at first to b e r e j e c t e d as p r e s u m p t u o u s a n d c h i m e r i c a l " (ibid., p. xxi). This is n o t to say t h a t we c a n n o t a r r i v e at w h a t s e e m to b e u n i v e r s a l p r i n c i p l e s . W h a t H u m e d e n i e s is t h e p o s s i b i l i t y o f e x p l a i n i n g w h y t h e y a r e u l t i m a t e a n d f u n d a m e n t a l . This r e j e c t i o n reflects H u m e ' s a p p r e c i a t i o n o f t h e limits o f e p i s t e m o l o g i c a l inquiry. A n d he goes o n to r e c o g n i z e t h e conseq u e n c e s this v i e w has for o u r e x p e c t a t i o n s with r e s p e c t to t h e sciences. But if this impossibility of explaining ultimate principles should be esteemed a defect in the science of man, I will venture to affirm, that 'tis a defect common to it with all the sciences, and all the arts, in which we can employ ourselves . . . . (Ibid., p. xxi) H u m e ' s p o s i t i o n h e r e w i t h r e s p e c t to t h e s e c u r i t y o f t h e sciences is more than merely the result of unbridled skepticism. Descartes' skepticism is r a t h e r s e v e r e as well. R a t h e r , H u m e ' s c o n c l u s i o n s reflect a f u n d a m e n t a l l y d i f f e r e n t a p p r e c i a t i o n o f just w h a t h u m a n b e i n g s a r e , t h e i r c o g n i t i v e limits a n d t h e i r a p p r o p r i a t e a s p i r a t i o n s . T h e s e insights h a v e p r o f o u n d c o n s e q u e n c e s for t h e p h i l o s o p h y of science. H u m e re-

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futes Descartes' rationalistic conception of the structure of science, and he does so by arguing from within the epistemological position of the way of ideas. On this reading of Book I, Hume's argument constitutes a reductio of the epistemology of ideas. If the epistemology of ideas is correct, then human reason is severely limited, says Hume. Knowing these limitations not only helps us appreciate the successes and anticipate the failures of the epistemology of ideas, but it also helps us to understand Descartes' problematic. That is, it helps us understand the epistemological context within which he was working. For example, Hume rejected innate ideas, but Descartes did not. Watching what happens to the theory of ideas when innate ideas are rejected allows us to appreciate the role they played for Descartes. It is against the background of further efforts to refine and develop Descartes' idea about ideas that we see better its merits and weaknesses. It just may be the case that Descartes had a better theory of ideas than Hume did and that Hume was led to his rejection of the theory of ideas as a complete epistemology because his own conception of an epistemology based on ideas was impoverished; but we can only speculate in that way against the background of assessing the problematic. Speculation to one side, I doubt that Hume could have arrived at his own conception of the limits of human reason if the ways of ideas had not been been so compellingly laid out by Descartes and then, as Marjorie would have it, misconstrued by Locke. Descartes' epistemology of ideas (by way of Berkeley) is Hume's starting point; it is what he was given, his conceptual inheritance, and to arrive at his more complete view he must work through it, transforming both the theory, by exposing its fatal flaws, and the problematic. In this sense, Hume's Treatise encapsulates the kinds of issues I have been discussing regarding the role and history of problematics. In this context it makes sense to look a bit more closely at the Treatise. To get a sense of Hume's vision we need to look at the overall structure of the Treatise, with an eye to acknowledging Hume's debt to Descartes' programmatic insights, while at the same time realizing that much of what Descartes was up to (e.g., innate ideas) will be illuminated by such a reading of Hume. The first thing to remember is that to understand Hume here we need to look at the entire Treatise. Most discussions of the epistemological dimensions of Hume's thought stop with Book I. But there is more to Hume's epistemological view than what is expressed in Book I. By

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considering the skeptical dimension of Book I in light of Hume's avowed concern with morality in Book III, and his emphasis on a science of man in the introduction, we can find Hume's positive epistemology. 3 In Book I, Hume effectively destroys any attempt to define knowledge as certainty within the context of the epistemology of ideas. We are all familiar with that discussion. What we are perhaps not so familiar with are Hume's positive ideas. They concern the criteria for distinguishing the legitimacy of beliefs f r o m the sources or causes of those beliefs; they are not (as they are often thought to be) the elaboration of yet another philosophical speculation concerning the nature of the entities populating our world. This twofold approach by Hume to the problem of the nature of knowledge - tlaat is, his systematic use of skeptical reasoning to demolish a battery of alleged knowledge claims in the interest of forcing us to take seriously the distinction between the source of our beliefs and their legitimization - presents, on the surface, a colossal conflict of its own. For given the substantive as well as methodological results of his skepticism, any "science" would appear impossible, provided by "science" we mean something tied to the notion of knowledge as certainty - i e., provided we accept infallibilism. To unravel this puzzle we have to understand that, while Hume's decisive skeptical arguments against infallibilism in the context of the way of ideas mark a crucial way station on the path to its demise as an epistemological research program, his attack was not the stopping point of his own argument. His understanding of the epistemology of science was more sophisticated than that of many who followed him. To put the point somewhat differently, one might want to consider installing Hume, rather than Descartes, as the founder of the epistemology of modern science just because he was able to show how much more fruitful the scientific enterprise could be if it repudiated the conceptual prison of infallibilism in favor of a new program concentrating on issues concerning method and the creation or development of scientific belief, therein creating the modern problematic for the philosophy of science. To defend this would take us astray; nonetheless, these hints toward a long story should enable us to appreciate how Hume's skepticism provides the key to understanding the considerable amount he thought science or scientific reasoning could produce. Hume, like Descartes in many respects, was a classical skeptic, not a modern one, and his Pyrrhonism was intended as a productive ap-

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proach to knowledge. Hume used his skepticism to show that before we could have knowledge about the world, we needed to understand how we arrived at those ideas and beliefs which we thought constituted knowledge. That is, once we understand how we come to believe what we do, i.e., how the mind works, we shall be less inclined to accept the dogmatism of pure reason as a legitimate determinant of action. For, if it turns out that what we think ought to be the case is not a product of reason, but of something else, for example, the passions, then the inability of reason to produce certainty about the world is no longer a justification for inaction. For even if reason can only lead to the suspension of judgment, from which no action flows, the passions can legitimately motivate action. Thus, the Pyrrhonic suspension of belief concerning the state of the world is not only warranted, but virtually commanded, if we see that the proper (Humean) object of knowledge is man and not the world. Man is also the proper (temporally) first object of analysis for Descartes. And while Descartes makes the study of what it is to be human the starting point for his account of knowledge in general, Hume takes a different turn. In so doing, Hume proceeds to his own problematic. So this is the point at which Hume's problematic differs from Descartes'. And the contrast illuminates both philosophers' positions. Descartes' narrow concern with the foundations and structure of knowledge, with the problem of articulating the criteria for being rational, is not the concern of Hume. Hume rejects Descartes' problematic. In so doing and in articulating his own problematic, Hume attempts to focus on a different and wider set of problems than did Descartes. The contrast sharpens our appreciation of the depth of the problematic and assists us in our task of assessing the problematic. Thus, I would argue, to fully appreciate Descartes' problematic we need to understand Hume's reasons for rejecting it. Let us give a brief consideration of Hume's own problematic. Hume is not primarily concerned with knowledge per se but, rather, with the question " W h y do people act as they do?", in other words, "What are the causes of human action?". To this end, each of the books of the Treatise is devoted to different possible causes of action. Book I is concerned with cognitive reasons, Book II with the emotions, and Book III with morals. That is why we have to read the whole Treatise if we are to get the full impact of Book I, where Hume argues that reason is an inadequate source of action.

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The interesting thing is that, in his own words, "[m]orality is a subject which interests us above all others". And why is this? It is because, if Hume is a scientist at all, he is primarily a political scientist, and the Treatise is primarily a work in political science. And it will suffer from all the limitations Hume acknowledged in the preface to the Treatise. Thus, despite being a work in political science, it is based on a fallibilist epistemology and suffers correspondingly. That Hume was primarily interested in questions of morality at the time he wrote the Treatise is not in doubt, as I will show, but that the work should be viewed as political science will take more than can be accomplished here. For now let us look at an autobiographical letter Hume wrote in 1734. For those of us trained in the light of Hume the epistemologist, most of it makes no sense. But that should not be surprising since any tradition which puts Hume into our philosophical picture primarily in epistemological clothes is itself mistaken. Let us consider Hume's own concerns briefly. Having now Time & Leisure to cool my inflam'd Imaginations, I began to consider seriously how I should proceed in my Philosophical Enquiries. I found that the moral Philosophy transmitted to us by Antiquity, labor'd under the same Inconvenience that has been found in their natural Philosophy, of being entirely Hypothetical, & depending more upon Invention than Experience. Every one consulted his Fancy in erecting Schemes of Virtue & of Happiness, without regarding human Nature, upon which every moral Conclusion must depend. This therefore I resolved to make my principal Study, & the Source from which I wou'd derive every truth in Criticism as well as Morality. (Quoted in Mossner 1980, pp. 72-73)

As noted above, I will leave the argument for the claim that the Treatise is a work of political science for another time, but I will

continue under that assumption. Under this interpretation the main objective of the Treatise is the production of a reasonable framework for schemes for manipulating human beings into successful communal interaction. These schemes, Hume believes, must follow from a firm understanding of what makes men act, both on behalf of their own interests and, if possible, in the interests of others. Furthermore, Hume, even at the tender age of twenty-five, was something of a cynic with regard to the motives for action. He has one crucial result from Book II which he introduces at the beginning of Book III: "[R]eason is perfectly inert, and can never either prevent or produce any action or affection" (Hume 1888, p. 458). Thus reason can never influence morality. Shortly thereafter he reaffirms this claim. "Reason is wholly inac-

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tive, and can never be the source of so active a principle as conscience, or a sense of morals" (ibid., p. 458). Thus, he concludes, reason can only have an influence on action by exciting a passion or discovering a connection between a cause and effect which thereby permits a passion to be exerted. Actions are governed by the passions. So, since reason cannot directly influence action, morals cannot be derived from reason. That means that abstract morality cannot be the object of a science (ibid., p. 468), where "science" is read as fielding certainty, i.e., a Cartesian science; thus government based on appeals to principles of morality cannot be scientifically founded. And that is the punch line. For Hume is concerned with the foundations of government. At least that is how I read his reference to "the peace of society" (ibid., p. 457). The view that Hume is arguing against in Book III proposes that the foundation of government is morality and that morality is either derived from reason or from religion. Hume has already spent a great deal of time in Book II showing why reason is irrelevant here. The other option, religion, is equally irrelevant, for it is just as much in doubt for Hume. If a psychological explanation is required to account for the direction Hume takes here, one might appeal to his anticlerical views. But since his central argument is that moral systems derived from reason cannot affect action (since reason is inert and morality is not) and "an active principle can never be founded on an inactive" (ibid., p. 459), appeals to anticlerical sentiments seem a bit farfetched. His conclusion concerning the impotence of reason can be better explained by appeal to the simple common-sense fact that high sounding principles of morality rarely in fact affect daily action. People act primarily out of self-regard. Not only is this true, but Hume spends most of Book III demonstrating how reasons from selfconcern can, but should not, be confused with moral claims. For despite the fact that Hume does not believe abstract principles of morality can be justified, it does not follow that many of the traditional features of moral systems are not derivable or explainable in other ways. The procedure Hume follows, in retaining traditional moral precepts while undermining their claims to abstract independent justification, parallels the method he uses in Book I. There he argues not against the existence of our idea of causes for example, but, rather, against the conclusion that because we have such an idea that it necessarily corresponds to a real and necessarily feature of the world. The contrast here with Des-

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cartes is revealing. For in the Meditations, Descartes insists on reason overriding any other possible sources or motivation for justified action. One way to appreciate this is to recall that for Descartes the source of error lies in the will. The will takes us beyond what reason allows, and the will is not an intellectual faculty. So for Descartes, the very factors which H u m e alludes to as legitimately motivating action, and for which he has an analysis, suggesting that we can control them, Descartes rejects as irrelevant. I have suggested that the H u m e of the Treatise is best read as a political scientist. This is to be contrasted with political theorist. For H u m e ' s interest as expressed in the Treatise is to expose the atoms out of which the body politic can be constructed, not to provide a necessary scheme for that construction. Granted, given his assumptions and the outcomes of his investigations, certain forms of governments are made to seem more obvious than others. But in the closing to Book III he draws a parallel between his work and a theorist with that of an anatomist and a painter. The anatomist ought to emulate the painter . . . . There is even something hideous, or at least minute in the view of things, which he presents; and 'tis necessary the objects shou'd be set more at a distance, and be more cover'd up from sight, to make them engaging to the eye and imagination. A n anatomist, however, is admirably fitted to give advice to a painter; and 'tis even impractical to excel in the latter art, without the assistance of the former. We must have an exact knowledge of the parts, their situations and connexion, before we can design with any elegance or correctness. A n d thus the most abstract speculations concerning human nature, however cold and unentertaining, become subservient to practical morality; and may render this latter science more correct in its precepts and more persuasive in its exhortations. (Ibid., pp. 620-21).

The objective of the Treatise then is a science of practical morality with all the caveats that entails; that is, an account of the day-to-day requirements of living and surviving in society as opposed to a general theory about the nature of the good. On Hume's view such a science of practical morality requires an analysis of those features of the human understanding which affect action, so that any prescriptions for altering actions can be assured of success, resting as they will on an accurate understanding of the kinds of influences that succeed in altering men's behavior and how they work. Hume's main point here can be summarized this way: Descartes' theory of ideas gave us the key to understanding how the mind works; the mistake was to confuse understanding how the mind acquires contents with the characterization of those

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contents as knowledge, if knowledge and reason are to be construed as motivators of human action. Thus, Hume rejects the idea that understanding how the mind works simultaneously yields an account of knowledge. But he does not deny that the way of ideas is a basically sound approach to understanding how the mind works. The point of Hume's analysis is to show that the force and vivacity of ideas generated from experience create belief, construed as a gentle force which impels us toward some action or other. But it does not follow, for Hume, that that gentle force is a guarantee of the reliability of the content of the belief. But, since the source of ideas results in the gentle force of beliefs, it has some bearing on the reliability of beliefs. Thus, Hume's account of the workings of the human mind building on, by carefully contextualizing, Descartes' way of ideas, finally produces a starting point for the science of man which eluded Descartes. It also helps us understand better the limitations of Descartes' program. For Descartes, the only proper motivator for action was reason. His problematic was defined by the limitations of paying attention only to the demands of reason. The limitations of this perspective can be determined using a number of techniques, but I hope to have shown that one of those techniques is to contrast the problematic of Descartes against another, in this case that of Hume. The problematics are different, despite the fact that Hume and Descartes both employ the way of ideas in articulating those problematics. Thus, we can see how they share in interesting ways the same concerns, in one sense, and that Hume's more robust view changes the nature of the problematic. If it is not yet clear that Hume's conception of human beings as necessarily embodied is in sharp contrast to Descartes' thinking thing, consider that wonderful passage at the end of Book I of the Treatise. It comes just after Hume concludes that the results of all this philosophy, exposing the imperfection of reason, is quite debilitating. The intense view of these manifold contradictions and imperfections in human reason has so wrought upon me, and heated my brain, that I am ready to reject all belief and reasoning. (Ibid., p. 268)

But, as it happens, "since reason is incapable of dispelling these clouds, nature herself suffices to that purpose" (ibid., p. 269). He dines, enjoys the company of friends and finds it hard to return to philosophy. And he concludes, "I may, nay I must yield to the current of nature, in submitting to my senses and understanding; and in this blind submis-

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sion, I show most perfectly my sceptical disposition and principles" (ibid., p. 269). H e cannot remove himself from the world and that fact affects his appreciation of both reason and the attractions of what he calls "indolence and pleasure". The embodied human fights both the depression of excessive reason and the follies of bodily temptation and, furthermore, he cannot help but do both, suggesting that he cannot avoid the fact that he is embodied. In conclusion, let me return to look one last time at H u m e and Descartes and the issue of changing problematics in the history of philosophy. If, as I suggested above, the way to understand the problematic for a given philosopher is to look both at the tradition within which he is working and to the consequences of his proposals, we see now that only by understanding how Descartes' view of a science of man constitutes a more restrictive program than Hume's can we appreciate the significance of Descartes in the history of philosophy. The way of ideas is a program for restricting epistemological considerations to the contents of the human mind. Why this is ultimately an unsuccessful epistemological ploy can only be appreciated against a set of different objectives for the science of man. Descartes' search for a certain foundation for knowledge and the sciences removes man as an active player in the world from the science. Reason may be active, but it need not be active in the world for Descartes. But that is not apparent from a reading of the Meditations, for, on the surface, with the fact of a thinking human at the heart of the enterprise, this claim seems ludicrous. But Descartes' human being is a pale shadow of the passion driven actor in H u m e ' s play, to change metaphors, a bare skeleton extracted, as it were, from the full-bodied creature. We must have Hume's attempt to construct a science of man in hand first, or something very much like it, to understand and appreciate, by way of contrast, the nature of the problem Descartes attempted to solve, or to understand Descartes at a l l . 4 NOTES 1 For an elaboration of these issues and others concerning Galileo's Dialogue, see Pitt (1992). 2 The example here is not intended as anything near a full-scale analysis of the developm e n t of the transition arising from Descartes' introduction of his new way of ideas. My truncated treatment of both H u m e and Descartes is designed to m a k e a conceptual point about the nature of problematics, not to offer a complete historical analysis.

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3 See Annette Baier (1991) for a reading of Hume sympathetic to the one proposed here. 4 I owe Richard Burian many thanks for his serious help on this paper. While the flaws remain mine, there would have been many more without his patient reading and arguing. REFERENCES Baier, A.: 1991, A Progress of Sentiments: Reflections on Hume's Treatise, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Descartes, R.: 1984, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans, by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff and Dugald Murdoch, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Grene, M.: 1985, Descartes, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis. Hume, D.: 1888, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. by L. A. Selby-Bigge, Clarendon Press, Oxford. Linberg, D. and R. Westman: 1990, Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Mossner, E. S.: 1980, The Life of David Hurne, 2nd edn., Clarendon Press, Oxford. Pitt, J. C.: 1992, Galileo, Human Knowledge, and the Book of Nature; Method Replaces Metaphysics, Kluwer, Dordrecht. Department of Philosophy Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University Blacksburg, VA 24601-0126 U.S.A.