Did Hume have a dynamic conception of the mind?

David Hume famously declared that it is "successive perceptions only that constitute the mind" insisting that the mind is "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, A Treatise of Human Nature, Book I Part IV Section 6. Does this mean that he embraced what I am calling a 'dynamic' conception of the mind?

No. As regards the cupboard, Hume is with Locke - though it is true that he thinks rather implausibly of a cupboard with neither top nor bottom nor sides (Treatise Book I, Part IV, Section VI, p.240). How does he arrive at this awkward position?

The corpuscular conception

John Locke had thought of the mind as a cabinet furnished with 'ideas' and of 'ideas' on the model of the 'corpuscules' of the physics of his time (and indeed of his own understanding of the material world). Corpuscularianism (as we encounter it in Locke) maintains that everything material is made up exclusively of minute particles of matter, particles which have a definite size and shape and location in space and which sometimes link up with each other to form complexes.

The significance of approaching 'ideas' on the model of corpuscles is that the task of understanding the mind becomes that of working out the laws which govern the way in which 'ideas' behave. 'Ideas' are thought of as having their behaviour governed by the 'impacts' [Hume was to talk of the exertion of 'gentle forces'] of one idea upon the other, and by the manipulations of what Locke calls 'the mind' (in spite of thinking of the mind as made up of ideas: I don't pursue the question of whether this is an inconsistency on Locke's part). The endeavour is to discover what laws govern the make-up of the ideas appearing before the mind, and their sequence.

Unfortunately, if one attempts to pursue in more detail the foundational analogy between a mental idea and a physical corpuscle, it appears that none of the obvious features of the corpuscular model actually carry across to the mental. Corpuscles are material and spatial, ideas are mental and do not belong to space. Ideas are quasi-corpuscles, not corpuscles, we may say - a locution that conveniently camouflages the difficulty.

Hume's attempt to move beyond suggestive analogy and express what is literally true of the mental corpuscles - he calls them 'perceptions' - which are to be invoked in explanations of mental phenomena goes like this:

'All perceptions' Hume says, 'are distinct. They are, therefore, distinguishable, and separable, and may be conceived as separately existent, and may exist separately, without any contradiction or absurdity.' Treatise, Appendix.

Here we have in succinct and literal form the fundamental conception in the early Modern conception of mentality: mentality as made up of quasi-atoms, the 'ideas' of John Locke, the 'perceptions' of David Hume.

Locke thought the mental particles furnished a mental 'cabinet', the 'cabinet' that, with the support of the dictionary, I am disrespectfully referring to as a cupboard. About the cabinet Hume was to disagree: or at least, he agreed but only to the extent that there could be a cabinet without sides or top or bottom. He thought we had no empirical basis for thinking there was a cabinet in the with-sides sense, but he never broke with the fundamental Lockean conception that the constitution of the mind and therefore an understanding of the mind and its workings were to be approached on the analogy of material corpuscularianism.

In one sense of the term, a 'perception', as Hume understood it, was a 'substance'. That is, he thought, a perception depended, on nothing for its existence.

'My conclusion ... is, that since all our perceptions are different from each other, and from every thing else in the universe, they are also distinct and separable, and may be considered as separately existent, and may exist separately, and have no need of any thing else to support their existence. They are, therefore, substances, as far as this definition explains a substance.' Hume, Treatise, Book I Part IV Section V.

This wasn't very far. Hume thought qualities were substances in this sense too:

"Every quality being a distinct thing from another, may be conceived to exist apart, and may exist apart, not only from every other quality, but from that unintelligible chimera of a substance." Treatise Book I Part IV, Section III.

Hume feels able to insist on both points because he thinks he has established that there are no 'necessary connections' in nature. To say of a thing A that it is dependent on something else B is to say there is such a link: it is to say A could not exist if B didn't.

It is therefore according to Hume not just perceptions and qualities that are substances in this sense, but simply everything:

"[T]his definition (of substance, as something which may exist by itself) dependent on any other thing agrees to every thing, that can possibly be conceived" (Hume, Treatise, Book I, Part IV p.222)

Hume reaches the limits of the cupboard

The understanding of a 'perception', as something that has no necessary connexion with either other perceptions or whatever they may be held to 'inhere in', is one part of the embarrassing position Hume finds himself in when he tries to give a Humean account of 'personal identity' - by which he means the belief we have that a person is one thing and not a multiplicity of things (ie a mere sequence of perceptions).

His embarrassment only emerges once he has published the Treatise. It is when he reviews -for a second edition - the account of personal identity he gives in the first that he confesses to finding it flawed, and confesses moreover that he cannot think of any means of repair. [Some commentators have argued that Hume is confessing to no such thing. More]

For our purposes it is not necessary to understand the source of his disatisfaction. It involves his commitment to the 'corpuscular' conception of mentality but it is not so severe as to lead him to question it. The two principles that together make for the difficulty are statements of (a) the corpuscular view and (b) the thesis that as far as we know there are no necessary connections in nature:

He cannot find an adequate theory of how we are led to our ordinary belief that a mind is an enduring unitary entity within the fraemwork defined by these twin commitments: but - I think without irony - he says given more time he might, or others might.

The problem as he conceives of it is this. To his own satisfaction he has established the thesis that a mind is nothing but a sequence of perceptions. But he acknowledges that ordinarily we all think of a mind not as a set of things - a sequence of perceptions - but as one thing. We ordinarily think of the mind as one thing, and as a thing that endures through time.

His question is: how do we acquire this belief? - the belief that the mind is a unitary thing that endures, as distinct from a sequence of several things, each of which exists only momentarily?

He had another problem which is in some ways similar: how do we get the idea of an enduring object when all we have to go on so to speak are a number of individual perceptions. His answer, with which he is satisfied, but which is complicated and difficult, is crucially dependent on the notion of the mind being misled. What it actually encounters are sequences of perceptions, but what it mistakenly thinks it is encountering (in some circumstances) is a single extended perception and thus (Hume thinks it follows) the perception of a single enduring thing.

Hume's account of how the mind is misled in the case of enduring objects relies on the thesis that in general the mind easily mistakes two perceptions that are like each other for one and the same perception. To use one of Hume's own examples, let us suppose we are looking out to sea, and that that we are distracted for a moment, and finally return our gaze to the sea. What we actually experience here, as Hume understands it, is a sequence of perceptions: of the sea, then of something else (the cornfield on the clifftop say), then of the sea again. What is there in this sequence of experiences that misleads us into thinking that the sea exists for an extended period of time (whereas our perceptions of it come and go in an instant)? Hume says: as a result of having the sequence described the mind is under pressure to believe two things. First it is under pressure to generate the belief that there is the perception of the sea that we first have, and that there is a second thing, the perception of the sea when my gaze returns to it. But second, because the mind has a habit of mistaking two exactly similar perceptions for just the one perception, there is pressure on it to generate a second belief, viz that there is just one perception of the sea.

The mind resists the generation of two beliefs which are inconsistent with one another. What it does therefore is generate a further belief which resolves the conflict: the belief that though we turn away from the sea for a moment to look at the cornfield the a perception of the sea nonetheless exist at that very moment - ie at the very moment we are actually looking at the cornfield. We suppose this perception to resemble the perception of the sea it immediately follows, and therefore to resemble the perception of the sea it precedes. Because the mind habitually mistakes two resembling perceptions for just the one perception, it ends up with the belief that there is just one perception of the sea. This is now a perception which is believed to endure - if begins before the gaze shifts from the sea and it goes on after the gaze returns to the sea. Moreover, because part of it at any rate exists even though it is not being perceived, this imagined perception is being thought of existing independently of perception. We therefore have a belief in something independent and enduring, which was to be proved.

Does this explanation suggest how we might come by our belief that a person is one thing rather than a sequence of things?

The crucial failure of this would-be parallel is that we have, thinks Hume (famously), no impression of the self. What we 'see' when we turn the gaze 'inward' are successive perceptions, but no impression of 'the self'.

If we did have such an impression, and then had another such impression subsequently, perhaps after experiencing impressions of other kinds, the situation would indeed be analogous to our having successive impressions of the sea which our mind converted into a belief that there was such a thing as an independently existing and enduring object, namely the sea. But no such impressions of the self are to be found.

This leaves Hume in his celebrated impasse: despite every effort, he cannot think of any other way in which the belief that a person is one thing and not a succession of things (perceptions) might be generated. And yet, he thinks, generated it must be.

BUD

He puts his difficulty as a dilemma. He is committed to the foundational belief that no perception is connected with any other or with anything else. So the apparent unification of several perceptions into one thing is not provided by the perceptions themselves. They are merely a set of independent existences. But the alternative seems to be that the (apparent) unification must be the work of the mind.

The fact remains that neither of these possibilities (as they appear to be to me) seemed apparent or realistic to Hume. On that assumption - that there was no way of explaining how the illusion of the enduring self might be generated - Hume must be understood as reaching an impasse from which no resolution was to be found - none, that is, within the corpuscular framework. You then had two propositions, neither of which could be abandoned, which could not both be true - could not, that is, if it were conceded that there was no way in which the illusion of the enduring self might be generated.

Hume himself was therefore profoundly unhappy with his account of the self, as is testified in the famous Appendix to the Treatise - and the fact that the subject is not dealt with in the Enquiry at all, nor in any of Hume's subsequent writings. Hume clearly felt driven into an impossible position - driven by a force he could not withstand.

My understanding of his impasse is therefore this. He inherited, and did not think of rejecting, the cupboard model of the mind articulated by Locke. But that understanding proved irreconcilable with empiricism.

Detail.

This model yields the tenet that the mind is nothing but a sequence of perceptions. But we ordinarily think of the mind as one enduring thing, not a sequence of transient things. How is this belief generated?

His commitment to the cupboard model seems to have been something somehow, for Hume, beyond challenge. He sketches it perfunctorily at the outset of his Treatise devoted to developing an empirical account of 'the extent and force of human understanding' (Treatise, Introduction, Everyman p.4) As Stroud declares, "Hume gives a quick, not very careful or thorough, exposition of the theory of the mind that he adopts without criticism from his predecessors." Stroud, H., p17. The entire discussion of the Treatise, and then of the Enquiry, is developed within its framework. Only in his brief engagement with the question of 'personal identity' in Part IV of the first book of the treatise does he feel the force of its limitations, but even there, and having got to the point of formulating a breakout, he halts, confronted by the unthinkable, and withdraws, confounded.

Hume's inherited and unchallenged framework for thinking about the mind is conveyed with some poignency by the Theatre analogy. The mind he says can be thought of as a kind of theatre "where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, repass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations." But, he says,"the comparison of the theatre must not mislead us." Why not? There is something to a theatre which has nothing corresponding to it in the mind. Of course, modern readers will anticipate: there is no audience in the mind. But that is not what Hume says at all. What he thinks a theatre has but a mind lacks: walls and roof!

But what is left of the analogy of a theatre without a building? Only actors and their audience. The proposition that perceptions passing and repassing, gliding and mingling on the stage might not have an audience is clearly not one that occurs to him.

The Subject of Hume

Hume seems to be commited to the idea that there is more to the self than its perceptions

Almost everything Hume says appears to commit him to the view that the mind cannot possibly be understood as a mere set of perceptions. That is, he everywhere writes of the mind as doing things: and in the very passage in which he argues for 'the bundle theory of the mind' he repeatedly speaks of a relationship between his perceptions and himself: "I never catch myself at any time without a perception"; "When I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble upon some perception or other .."; "That action of the imagination, by which we consider the uninterrupted and invariable object, and that by which we reflect on the succession of related objects, are almost the same to the feeling..."

What we are used today to call "the subject" appears to be present throughout - throughout the Treatise, and also throughout the argumentation that is usually taken to be directed squarely at the "the subject's" elimination.

Barry Stroud says that there is an easy counter to this apparent inconsistency. He argues that the attribution of agency to 'the mind' (or one of its 'faculties') that is repeatedly found in Hume can be understood as a shorthand way of speaking of nothing more than the sequences of perceptions with which he insists the mind is to be identified.

'For me to think, to feel, to reflect, to attribute identity to something - in short, for me to perform any of these 'mental acts' - is just for a certain perception to occur in my mind.' Stroud, H., p.30.

'If the mind is, strictly speaking, nothing but a bundle of perceptions, then talk of the mind's operations or dispositions is to be understood as conditional talk about what appears in the mind if certain other things appear there...To say that it has various dispositions is just to say that various conditional statements are true of the way in which these perceptions occur there.' Stroud, H., p.131.

So it is not safe to infer from Hume's talk of the mind and its activity that he is committed to its existence over and above the perceptions it furnishes.

Nevertheless, the picture of the mind as made up of mental atoms raises the difficult question: are these ideas not 'experienced' by something that is not itself an idea? This is the role that is often apparently attributed to 'the mind' itself, or indeed to the person.

It is often assumed that Hume's answer to this concern is that there is no subject, no experiencer of ideas. There is, he is often assumed to conclude, no 'self': only ideas themselves. If one wants to speak of a person or self one can only be referring to a set of ideas related in some way - related by a relation which confers some kind of unity upon them: the bundle theory of the self.

But it is not clear to me that Hume is correctly represented thereby. Hume's celebrated discussion, which leads up to his declaration that 'they are the successive perceptions only that constitute the mind', is directed at the problem of the continuing existence of the self through time. He alleges he can find no impression that could have given rise to such an idea.

But must he be taken to mean that a perception can occur without its being 'perceived'? - that there is no difference between there being an idea point and there being an idea which a subject is entertaining? Yes, it is clear that he is saying any perceiver - a subject, let us say, - cannot be thought to endure through time. But might he not be thinking of each perception as requiring a subject - a momentary subject - at the moment of the perception's existence? Might not he have thought it necessary for a perception to have a subject, but not necessary for that subject to be extended in time?

This is better put by saying that Hume doesn't have the 19th/20th Century conception of a 'subject'.

It is true that Kant brought arguments against the coherence of such a position. He argued that in order to have experience of any kind, the subject had to think of him or herself as having a sequence of experiences. He argued, in other words, for the unity of apperception, or in Strawson's rivetting uncasualness: 'that there must be such unity among the members of some temporally extended experiences as is required for the possibility of self-consciousness, or self-ascription of experiences, on the part of a subject of such experiences." Strawson, BoS, p.24.

But there is no reason to think Hume had anticipated Kant's argument, and less that he had read them.

After Hume

Nineteenth Century thinkers were able to think outside the cupboard: and the intrguing question is: what shift made what was impossible for Hume thinkable for them?

The human 'will', says Schopenhauer for example, - and the mind is the 'will' for Schpenhauer - is to be understood as constant activity - 'endless flux', 'eternal becoming' (Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, first published as Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung in 1819, Dover edition translated from the German by E.F.J.Payne, New York, 1966, Dover, p. 164.)

Kant is still in the cupboard, but those who took inspiration from him broke out. They took the notion of the noumenal self and threw away the interdict that nothing should be said of that which on its own creator's theory could not be said. Kant quite rightly felt alienated from his 'followers'. The real human being, the noumenal self, never had been a cupboard, if only because it had never been allowed to be thought of as anything. Idealists like Schpenhauer were able to think of the mind in a new way.

Taking his cue explicitly from new ways of thinking about physiology, Schopenhauer thought of the mind as constituted by activity: activity for which, since it was activity of the mental kind, another name was thinking.

So what was the shift? It was, for the conceptualisation of the mind just as it was for the conceptualisation of the body, Foucault's 'irruption of time'. At the turn of the 18th Century time entered into the constitution of things.

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