Did Hume have a dynamic conception of the mind?

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

No. Hume is locked in the cupboard with the Locke, and it is this which drives him to the famous perplexity he records when he comes to think again (in the Appendix to the Treatise) about the theory of 'personal identity' which he had developed in Book I.

'All perceptions' he 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 form the fundamental conception in the early Modern conception of mentality: mentality as made up of quasi-atoms, the 'ideas' of John Locke.

Just as the properties of material stuffs like gold were to be understood, according to early modern science, as flowing from the minute particles of which they were conceived of as being made, so the properties of mental stuffs were to be understood as flowing from the mental particles of which minds were conceived of as being made up.

Locke thought the mental particles furnished a mental 'cabinet'. Hume disagreed. He thought we had no empirical basis for thinking there was such a cabinet, 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.

Hume's term for the mental particulars of early Modern psychology was 'perception'.

In one sense of the term, a perception was a 'substance'. That is, it 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.

What is his argument for the proposition that there are no necessary connections' in nature?

The argument he establishes most firmly is that no-one has an impression of such necessity. But there is also this: we can conceive of one thing (perception, quality, thing) existing independently of any other.

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)

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 impossible position Hume finds himself in when he tries to give a Humean account of the mind or self. If he treats a perception as a 'distinct existence' he must conclude that there is no necesary connection between any one and anything else. But if he takes the alternative of saying there is some necessary connection between the different perceptions a mind has, he has to abandon his thesis that perceptions are distinct existences.

The difficulty of taking the first alternative and admitting that there is no necessary connection between any perception and anything else has been noticed a good deal. It gives rise to the question: In virtue of what then makes my perceptions mine and your perceptions yours?

Hume has encountered a similar difficulty when considering our belief that there are about us objects that endure through time, and there he has a solution to suggest - in spite of the fact that we have no evidence of this. Somehow, our mind, though experiencing a sequence of different perceptions, subsequently entertains the idea of one thing enduring. How are we to account for this? Hume invokes the principle that two perceptions which resemble each other may be mistaken by the mind for one continuing perception. (This principle is an example of an empirical causal law which is thought of as contributing to our understanding of the mind ie of the sequence of ideas. What is the evidence for the truth of this empirical claim? Our familiar experience.)

On the model of his explanation of how we come falsely to believe in enduring material objects, Hume explains that he would like to be able to show that there is something about a series of perceptions that results in the mind slipping so easily from one to the other that it mistakenly thinks there is one thing there and not a plurality. In the case of our belief in an enduring material object Hume thinks the relevant successive perceptions resemble each other sufficiently for the mind to be misled. But no such resemblance can plausibly be said to characterise all the perceptions that I want to call mine.

The mind sometimes moves from one idea to another, Hume accepts, in virtue not of the one resembling another, but of the one causing the other (undertanding causality in the humean way), or of the objects they derive from having a casal relationship of that kind. Could this apply in the case of the perceptions that make up a mind? Hume can't accept that it does. My perceptions do not consist of a sequence of perceptions such that each, or the object each derives from, is the cause of the perception or object that follows it.

Hume thinks there is a third principle which sometimes affects the sequencing of my perceptions: the mind easily slips he says from a particular perception to another which is contiguous with it. (Ie a perception is often followed by a 'contiguous' perception, the one perception 'naturally introducing' the other (Hume, Treatise, Book I Part I Section 4) For example, a perception of a house and a perception of a garage next to the house. If the garage was perceived as next to the house, there will be an' influenc'e exerted by the perception of the house on the perception of the garage such that the perception of the garage is likely to follow the perception of the house, whenever the lattter is conjured up by the imagination. But again, this principle does not help Hume with his search for an explanation of why my perceptions are perceived by me as mine. That is, he thinks it is obvious that my perceptions do not simply follow the pattern of the successive frames of a single pan shot. This principle of continuity in time or pace is a mite more complicated than it sounds. The thought I take it is this. When I look at my surroundings, I get a series of perceptions whose order is see by the movement of my scanning eye: first the house, then the garage which is to the right of it, then the lilac to the right of the garage. What the principle asserts is that when I subsequently have the idea of the house it is liable to be followed by the idea of the garage, and the idea of the garage to be followed by the idea of the lilac. The order in which impressions were received scores a bit of a groove in the mind, if I may put it so, such that if I subsequently have the idea of of the house, it is likely that it will be followed by the idea of the garage. This is a empirical claim which may or may not be true.

Supposing it was true, would it help explain why we think of all our perceptions as belonging to me?

Hume sees no hope in that direction, and who can gainsay him. But the objection is not that my experience is other than that of a camera engaged in a single pan shot. The objection is that the sequence of perceptions that make me up cannot be explained on the principle of contiguity. At any rate, and we need not pursue the matter, that is what Hume thinks.

It is not clear to me why the necessary explanation might not be provided by a conjuntion of the principles he recognises.

There is no real connection between successive perceptions, but each perception exerts an influence on what is to follow it. Why shouldn't the three recognised principles interacting produce the set of sequences that is me?

And: why doesn't Hume acknowledge that there may be other principles at work which he hasn't thought of, and that these, in conjunction with the others, generate the set?

Hume thinks there is a mental world of my perceptions (ideas and impressions) and that this world can be mapped onto the world of objects.

[The following quote doesn't say this:'Thus we find, that all simple ideas and impressions resemble each other; and, as the complex are formed from them, we may affirm in general, that these two species of perception are exactly correspondent.' (Hume,Treatise, Book I Part I Section I Intro, p.13)]

The corpuscular theory of the mind

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.

If one then tries to characterise 'ideas' (as conceived by Locke) unfortunately none of these features of the corpuscular model actually carry across. Corpuscules are material and spatial, ideas are mental and do not belong to space.

"An object may be said to be no where, when its parts are not so situated with respect to each other, as to form any figure or quantity; nor the whole with respect to other bodies so as to answer to our notions of contiguity or distance." (Hume, Treatise, Book I Part IV)

Ideas are quasi-corpuscules, not corpuscules, we may say - a locution that camouflages the difficulty.

The significance of approaching 'ideas' on the model of corpuscules 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.

The situation is though that Hume himself was 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 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.

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.

How do we reconcile this with his insistence that the mind is perceptions only?

BUD

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 thik 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. [See The dynamic mind]

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.

Hume notices something isn't there

David Hume may be thought to challenge the 'structural' conception of the mind when towards the end of the 18th Century when he insists 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.

The sequence of perceptions experienced by us as we look in on ourselves may be likened to scenes appearing on the stage of a theatre: but only, Hume is insistent, if we remind ourselves that we have - seriously - no idea whatsoever of the 'the place where these scenes are represented'.

Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, Book I Part IV Section 6 (my italics).

At least we can say this is no more than a half-way house however.

Denying that the mind is a cabinet, or the building within which a play takes place, does not remove the structural conception of mentality in itself. Ideas and 'impressions' are still thought of by Hume, as the building blocks out of which our mental world is built. If there is no building to contain them, no matter, they are the simples of which the mind is comprised.

The Subject of Hume

Some critics have suggested Hume is to be understood as saying that to have such and such a sense experience is for there to be such and such an impression or impressions 'present' in the mind.

This interpretation takes it that Hume denies the necessity of there being a subject of the experience. He is taken to be assuming that there could just be an impression in the mind, and that it's simply being there would constitute an experience.

What is often appealed to as making clear this as a commitment of Hume's is his argumentation on 'personal identity', with its celebrated conclusion that 'they are the successive perceptions only, that constitute the mind' Hume, Book I Part IV Section 6

Hume's topic in the discussion of which this is the denoument is personal identity, and is directed not at demonstrating that there is no subject but that the concept of the self as an entity enduring across time is not grounded in experience (and is thus flawed).

What he is attempting to show is that we have no grounds for believing in an enduring subject: but that is not the same as the thesis that there is no subject at all! On the contrary, Hume's idea, I believe, is that there are a great number of subjects, one for each 'perception' that belongs, momentarily, to the mind.

What is the evidence for thinking that as far as an individual perception is concerned, it can be experienced without there being a subject to experience it?

He commits himself to the subject in almost every line that he writes, and to disown this commitment, to show it to be merely a matter of words for example, he would have to engage in pointed argumentation. He doesn't.

_________

The Subject of Hume

This picture of the mind as made up of mental atoms is not straightforward however. It 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.

Draftings

[Good but wrongly directed:]

Hume writes all the time as though a perception requires a perceiver. for example: "An impression first strikes upon the senses, and makes us perceive heat or cold, thirst or hunger, pleasure or pain, of some kind or other." (Hume, Treatise, Part I Section II Everyman p.17; my italics.) "The qualities, from which this association arises, and by which the mind is, after this manner, conveyed from one idea to another, are three, viz. resemblance, continuity in time and place, and cause and effect."(Hume, Treatise, Part I Section IV Everyman p.19; my bold.)

But the usual interpretation of this is that he later shows (to his own satisfaction at any rate) that these are ways of talking only, and that in fact they are to be glossed as essentially cases of complex perceptions.

If for example I attribute a feeling of warmth to myself and think 'I - I - am warm' this cannot be understood as the mere occurrence the perception of warmth. In thinking I am warm I must be understood as having a more complicated perception than that, a perception that somehow links the present perception of warmth with some other perceptions. It is the incorporation of these other perceptions in my present perception that makes the difference between the occurrence of the perception of warmth and what is ordinarily articulated as attributing the feeling of warmth to myself.

If Hume is to be construed as denying the subject altogether, all references to 'the mind' will have to be glossed as ways of talking about the occurrences of perceptions. Moreover, there will be no room for glossing a thought as perceiving a relationship between perceptions: without a subject - strictly without a subject - there is nothing to do the perceiving. (All there can be are occurrences of perceptions.) The thought that attributes a perception to 'me' can only be understood therefore as the occurrence of a complex perception - one that must incude the simple perception of warmth, but also other perceptions, (or, I suppose, another perception) as well.

At any one time the experience of a person has to be understood as the occurrence of a single (though maybe a complex) perception.

We have to put alongside this conclusion Hume's apparent belief that perceptions occur, as far as a single person is concerned, one at a time. Consciousness is the occurrence of a single perception.

Is this coherent?

_________

When I am said to perceive heat for example, all that is meant is that the sensation of heat occurs. When the mind is said to be conveyed from one idea to another what is meant is that one perception is followed (in a regular way) by another.

Perceptions however are not quite thoughts, if Hume's examples of them are to be taken seriously, and we have to ask whether one idea can relate to another in the way required. It is no good falling back on any role for 'the mind' in this analysis - since that is what we are trying to do without. We will have to say: one perception links up with one or more others. But will this do the trick? What would be the perception that would amount to the thought: I am perceiving warmth?

It would have to be a complex perception, and one of it's componenets would have to be the perception of warmth. Another component would have to be the perception of another perception. perhaps the perception of the perception I describe as the one I had a moment ago.

This means that my thought 'I perceive warmth' is a matter of the occurrence of a complex perception.

Note that ex hypothesi it cannot be a relationship between ideas, because there is nothing to perceive that relationship. All there are are perceptions. Having a thought is the occurrence of a perception. To think 'I feel warm' is for a complex idea, one of whose components is the perception of warmth, to occur.

What I want to conclude is that the cabinet model of the mind, which Hume buys into with his theory that perceptions are the building blocks of knowledge, cannot accommodate the proposition that a perception has no perceiver.

It is true that Bertrand Russell defended the idea of there being 'sensibilia', by which he meant 'sense data' that are not being perceived. But that was more than a century later, and well beyond the watershed I am attempting to articulate between the 18th C and what came after. The possibility of perceiverless perceptions is one of the marks, I will argue, of the 20th thought about the mind.

There is built into the idea of an idea the requirement that there must be a subject of it, something having it. This is the doctrine that nothing in the mind is concealed from the Eye of consciousness, as assumed to be obvious by Descartes.

So the picture I am attributing to Hume is this: every perception requires a perceiver, but (for all we know) it is a different perceiver for each perception. We have no reason to think the perceiver of such and such an impression, or such and such an idea, is the same as any other.

Locke says: "[W]hen I say the senses convey into the mind, I mean, they from external objects convey into the mind what produces there those perceptions. (Locke's Essay, Book II Chapter I Section 3 (Everyman p.78))

I say this is Hume's conception of a person: a collection of 'perceptions'. It is at the same time Hume's conception of the mind. For Hume the question of what produces the 'successive existence of a mind' the one and the same as the question of what produces the successive existence of a 'thinking person'. "The only question, therefore, which remain is, by what relations [the]... uninterrupted progress of our thought is produced, when we consider the successive existence of a mind or thinking person." Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, Book I Part IV Section 6 (my italics). p.246.

Thus for Hume the mind just is a bundle of perceptions. And that is all there is to a person.

If this analysis prepares the way for the replacement of structure by process, it by no means achieves that transition on its own. Ideas and the impressions they derive from are conceived of by Hume as substances, if a 'substance' is taken to be "something which may exist by itself" - a point Hume argues at some length. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, Book I Part IV Section 5. p.221ff. The mind may be constituted by a procession of ideas and impressions, but each of those constitutive items is conceived of as a 'thing' - an atom of mentality in the Lockean mould, not itself a process or 'flow'.

When was the notion of the 'mental atom' abandoned? (By the time Russell had come to spwak of sense-data they had certainly been swept away, because Russell's was a turn of the spiral.) How is thinking conceived of once the conception of it as a parade of mental atoms is abandoned?

The locus classicus for the abandonment of the mental atom was George Boole's Laws of Thought, published in 1854. - well, no: Kant.

Kant makes a distinction between experience and thought. (Blackburn, who says that Kant made the decisive break with the 'sensationalist empiricism' of the 18th C)

Hume and the cupboard

The subject of Hume

The dynamic conception of mind

With romanticism the mind becomes identified not with things - mental corpuscles - but with activities.

The element of romantic thought that is often highlighted is the way in which they thought of the self as possessing potential. What is also there however, and this is something of more influence perhaps, is the idea that the self/mind as subject to perpetual development. Hume thought of the mind as rapidly sequencing corpuscles. For the romantics, there are no corpuscles, but activities. (Are we to say processes?)

Their stress on creativity is not a matter of corpuscles being brought into existence. Activity is itself creative in the sense that having corpuscles or there being corpouscles is not. To say the mind is essentially active is their way of making the point that the mind is creative, an agent not a cupboard.

It's not activity in the cupboard, it's activity instead of the cupboard. It is the dynamic conception of mind.

_________________

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.

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