Scottish philosopher David Hume: ‘A Treatise of Human Nature’ Essay

David Hume was a Scottish philosopher, historian, and economist best known today for his highly persuasive system of radical philosophical empiricism, skepticism, and naturalism. Beginning with his A Treatise of Human Nature, Hume attempted to create a total naturalistic knowledge of man that examined the psychological foundation of human nature. Against rationalism, Hume contended that passion rather than reason governs human behavior. He also argued that inductive reasoning, cannot be justified rationally our faith in induction comes from custom, habit, and experience rather than logic. He denied that humans have an actual conception of the self, arguing that we experience only a bundle of sensations, and that the self is nothing more than this bundle of causallyconnected perceptions.

Humes understanding of self never creates real connections but rather associates common ideas. He claims, The identity, which we attribute to the mind of man, is only a fictitious one, the same which we ascribe to plants and animal bodies. What he means by this is identity is no more than an effect, a quality, which we attribute to object because of the culmination of ideas in the imagination, we reflect upon identity through resemblance and causation. Hume claims that we use resemblance of current perception and past perceptions to create a link that makes all the different perceptions seem like a single, unified object.

David Hume, true to his extreme skepticism, eventually completely rejects the notion of identity. There are no underlying objects or persons that continue to exist over time, there are merely impressions this idea can be simplified into the following argument

1. Every idea ultimately arises from impressions.

2. So, the idea of a persisting self is ultimately rooted in impressions.

3. But, because no impression is a persisting thing

4. there cannot be any persisting idea of self.

The self must be a constantly stable thing yet all knowledge is derived from impressions, which are fleeting, nonpersisting things. Therefore it follows that we do not really have knowledge of a self.

When trying to think of ones self, it is rather difficult. When you try, the only things you can think about are individual impressions like hot, cold, light, dark, love, hate, pain, pleasure, etc. This implies that all you are is a group of successive impressions, or perceptions there is no underlying, stable thing called a self. The bundle of impressions is just an assembly of variable and episodic parts. For this reason, we never observe any necessary connections between discrete existences. However, when the mind records uninterrupted impressions that are comparable, it then believes that the only thing that is changing is time, and not the impression of ones self. The mind then mistakenly concludes that this continuous series of impressions is a persisting individual thing in its own right. This is how Hume understands that identity is just a union created in the imagination. He can therefore claim there is no personal identity because it is only a creation of ones own mid.