Notes on Hume and Kant Daniel Bonevac, The University of Texas at Austin 1 Hume on Identity Hume, an empiricist, asks the question that his philosophical stance demands: nor have we any idea of self, after the manner it is here explained. For from what impression could this idea be derived? Impressions produce ideas, which are something like faint copies of those impressions, and ideas have content by virtue of their being such copies. So, to determine the content of an idea, we have to trace it back to impressions from which it derives. But Hume can find no such idea: If any impression gives rise to the idea of self, that impression must continue invariably the same, through the whole course of our lives; since self is supposed to exist after that manner. But there is no impression constant and invariable. Pain and pleasure, grief and joy, passions and sensations succeed each other, and never all exist at the same time. It cannot, therefore, be from any of these impressions, or from any other, that the idea of self is derived; and consequently there is no such idea. Hume is looking for a mark, something internal to an impression or idea a mental content that indicates the self. He can t find one. It s as if he s looking for a logo: He can t find any little DH in the lower left that could represent himself. 1
Our eyes cannot turn in their sockets without varying our perceptions. Our thought is still more variable than our sight; and all our other senses and faculties contribute to this change; nor is there any single power of the soul, which remains unalterably the same, perhaps for one moment. Hume continues: For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception. These particular, momentary mental events are what Buddhist philosophers call dharmas. Hume s view, like that of most Buddhist philosophers, is that the self is nothing but a bundle of dharmas. This is the bundle theory of the self....i may venture to affirm of the rest of mankind, that they are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement. Hume speaks of the mind as something like a theater. But even that metaphor is misleading, for the theater exists independently of anything that takes place within it. Not so for the mind. The mind is a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, re-pass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations. There is properly no simplicity in it at one time, nor identity in different; whatever natural propension we may have to imagine that simplicity and identity. The comparison of the theatre must not mislead us. They are the successive perceptions only, that constitute the mind; nor have we the most distant notion of the place, where these scenes are represented, or of the materials, of which it is composed. He also speaks of it as a commonwealth: As to causation; we may observe, that the true idea of the human mind, is to consider it as a system of different perceptions or different existences, which are linked together by the relation of cause and effect, and mutually produce, destroy, influence, and modify each other. Our impressions give rise to their correspondent ideas; said these ideas in their turn produce other impressions. One thought chaces another, and draws after it a third, by which it is expelled in its turn. In this respect, I cannot compare the soul more properly to any thing than to a republic or commonwealth, in which the several members are united by the reciprocal ties of government and subordination, and give rise to other persons, who propagate the same republic in the incessant changes of its parts. And as the same individual republic may not only change its members, but also its laws and constitutions; in like manner the same person may vary his character and 2
disposition, as well as his impressions and ideas, without losing his identity. Whatever changes he endures, his several parts are still connected by the relation of causation. And in this view our identity with regard to the passions serves to corroborate that with regard to the imagination, by the making our distant perceptions influence each other, and by giving us a present concern for our past or future pains or pleasures. He concludes that there is no fact of the matter, in the world, about personal identity. The identity, which we ascribe to the mind of man, is only a fictitious one, and of a like kind with that which we ascribe to vegetables and animal bodies. It cannot, therefore, have a different origin, but must proceed from a like operation of the imagination upon like objects. 2 Hume on Objects This analysis isn t restricted to the self. It s the same with all objects:...the objects, which are variable or interrupted, and yet are supposed to continue the same, are such only as consist of a succession of parts, connected together by resemblance, contiguity, or causation. Hume thus advances a bundle theory of everything. A ship, a car, a table, a horse, a person each is not one thing, but a multiplicity. Our chief business, then, must be to prove, that all objects, to which we ascribe identity, without observing their invariableness and uninterruptedness, are such as consist of a succession of related objects. We associate perceptions, thoughts, feelings dharmas and group them together into objects. But their unity is artificial. It s a product of our thinking and speaking. It s not a feature of the world. For as such a succession answers evidently to our notion of diversity, it can only be by mistake we ascribe to it an identity; and as the relation of parts, which leads us into this mistake, is really nothing but a quality, which produces an association of ideas, and an easy transition of the imagination from one to another, it can only be from the resemblance, which this act of the mind bears to that, by which we contemplate one continued object, that the error arises. Hume doesn t restrict his argument to the absence of any impression of unity. That is indeed one of his arguments; he can t find any source for identity within experience, because he can t find anything constant in the experience of objects per se. That might seem too radical a conclusion. The table looks the same in the morning and the evening, day in and day out. It seems very strange to say that our perceptions of it have nothing in common. Partly, Hume is impressed by arguments of Berkeley, that our perceptions of ordinary objects do vary significantly over time. The table looks large when I m close to 3
it and small when I m far away. It looks dark in one light and much lighter in brighter light. The tower looks tall when I m close to it and small when I m far away. The coin looks round when I look at it straight on, oval when I see it obliquely, and like a thin line when I see it on edge. Partly, however, Hume has in mind some philosophical test cases for the persistence of objects. One is Descartes s ball of wax. The wax appears to be solid, opaque, of a definite size and shape. But then he warms it, and it melts. Now it s liquid, translucent, a puddle of no definite shape at all. Descartes can find nothing the two perceptions have in common. And yet they re perceptions of the same wax. Another is Heraclitus s river. Heraclitus famously said that you can t step into the same river twice; the water will be different, and even the path of the river will have changed, even if slightly and imperceptibly. Thus as the nature of a river consists in the motion and change of parts; though in less than four and twenty hours these be totally altered; this hinders not the river from continuing the same during several ages. The other puzzle that disturbs Hume, however, is the ship of Theseus. The original example comes from Plutarch: The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned from Crete had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians down even to the time of Demetrius Phalereus, for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their place, in so much that this ship became a standing example among the philosophers, for the logical question of things that grow; one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same. Thomas Hobbes creates a variant: someone gathers up the planks as they are discarded, and rebuilds the original ship, on the original design, with the original planks. Which is the same ship? Hume notes that it seems to make a difference how quickly all this takes place. If the planks are replaced slowly over time, we tend to think that the ship with the replaced planks is the same ship as the original ship of Theseus, and the ship rebuilt with the discarded planks is not the same, but rather a reconstruction of it. But if the ship goes into dry dock and has the planks replaced quickly, we might come to the opposite conclusion. Hume concludes that identity isn t in the world, but in us. Otherwise, why would the timing of the changes make any difference? A change in any considerable part of a body destroys its identity; but it is remarkable, that where the change is produced gradually and insensibly we are less apt to ascribe to it the same effect. The reason can plainly be no other, than that the mind, in following the successive changes of the body, feels an easy passage from the surveying its condition in one moment to the viewing of it in another, and at no particular time perceives any interruption in its actions. From which continued perception, it ascribes a continued existence and identity to the object. 4
Hume concludes that identity is a grammatical question rather than a metaphysical one....all the nice and subtile questions concerning personal identity can never possibly be decided, and are to be regarded rather as gramatical than as philosophical difficulties. Identity depends on the relations of ideas; and these relations produce identity, by means of that easy transition they occasion. But as the relations, and the easiness of the transition may diminish by insensible degrees, we have no just standard, by which we can decide any dispute concerning the time, when they acquire or lose a title to the name of identity. All the disputes concerning the identity of connected objects are merely verbal, except so far as the relation of parts gives rise to some fiction or imaginary principle of union, as we have already observed. 3 Kant on Synthesis Kant argues against Hume s position. One argument is that my thoughts, feelings, and perceptions are mine. I think, I feel, I perceive; I can always append I think to anything in the mind. The thoughts are not free-floating; they presuppose a subject. His more complex argument rests on synthesis. There are three kinds of synthesis synthesis of the manifold of intuition, as he puts it required in something as simple as perceiving a cup as a cup. 1. The Synthesis of Apprehension in Intuition. I look at the cup from various angles and distances; I touch it; I hear it clink when I place it on the table. My mind takes all these momentary perceptions from various senses and synthesizes them into one sensation of the cup. 2. The Synthesis of Reproduction in Imagination. My mind links those actual sensations to possible sensations in imagination. I not only see the cup from this distance, at this angle, but also imagine what it will look like when I m closer, or at a different angle, a few moments from now. I form expectations of what I might experience under various conditions. 3. The Synthesis of Recognition in a Concept. I recognize the object as a cup, applying a concept to it. The role of concepts is crucial: All knowledge demands a concept, though that concept may, indeed, be quite imperfect or obscure. But a concept is always, as regards its form, something universal which serves as a rule. The concept of body, for instance, as the unity of the manifold which is thought through it, serves as a rule in our knowledge of outer appearances. But it can be a rule for intuitions only in so far as it represents in any given appearances the necessary reproduction of their manifold, and thereby the synthetic unity in our consciousness of them... 5
All necessity, without exception, is grounded in a transcendental condition. There must, therefore, be a transcendental ground of the unity of consciousness in the synthesis of the manifold of all our intuitions, and consequently also of the concepts of objects in general, and so of all objects of experience, a ground without which it would be impossible to think any object for our intuitions; for this object is no more than that something, the concept of which expresses such a necessity of synthesis. This original and transcendental condition is no other than transcendental apperception. For Kant, then, the bundle, the multiplicity, the dharmas, presuppose a unity that makes experience and thought possible. Consciousness of self according to the determinations of our state in inner perception is merely empirical, and always changing. No fixed and abiding self can present itself in this flux of inner appearances. Such consciousness is usually named inner sense, or empirical apperception. What has necessarily to be represented as numerically identical cannot be thought as such through empirical data. To render such a transcendental presupposition valid, there must be a condition which precedes all experience, and which makes experience itself possible. There can be in us no modes of knowledge, no connection or unity of one mode of knowledge with another, without that unity of consciousness which precedes all data of intuitions, and by relation to which representation of objects is alone possible. This pure original unchangeable consciousness I shall name transcendental apperception. 6