Topics Philosophers

Question I want to say Hume was an idealist but this seems controversial. My reasoning goes like this. Hume thinks that all we can know comes from our personal experience (this is uncontroversial Hume was an empiricist). He also thinks that we have no justification for believing in an external world, because all we ever experience are our sense perceptions which, Hume thinks, are wholly mind dependent. So Hume thinks all we can know is mind dependent and we have no justification for believing that there is anything more than this. So for Hume all there is, is mind dependent stuff. This clearly makes Hume an idealist. So my qustion is am I right in saying that Hume was an idealist?

Accepted:
January 2, 2014

Comments

It's quite true that Hume uses psychological terminology when setting out his position, even to the point of using the term 'idea' itself (alongside 'impression'). So, simply taken at face value, I'd agree that he does come across as a bit of an idealist. Nevertheless, probing more deeply, I would still want to resist that conclusion. For, the terminology notwithstanding, where I would be most inclined to take issue with your summary is in the claim that he regards these perceptions as being "wholly mind dependent".

For something to be mind-dependent, I take it, the suggestion is that it couldn't exist without a mind. That certainly how a clear-cut idealist like Berkeley uses the term. But let's remember what Hume thinks the mind actually amounts to. It is, he says, "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" (Treatise 1.4.6). So any given perception will be existing in a mind, if and only if it bears certain relations to other perceptions in such a way as to constitute such a bundle with them. But now, is it essential to the reality of this perception that it should enter into such relations with those others? Hume would answer no. Here's what he says:

"Whatever is clearly conceiv'd may exist; and whatever is clearly conceiv'd, after any manner, may exist after the same manner. This is one principle, which has been already acknowledg'd. Again, every thing, which is different, is distinguishable, and every thing which is distinguishable, is separable by the imagination. This is another principle. My conclusion from both 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 consider'd 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." (Treatise 1.4.5)

So it turns out that the mind, taken as a complex whole, is ontologically dependent on its parts, the individual perceptions themselves, rather than their being dependent on it as modes of a more fundamental substance. But then what of bodies? Hume's position is perhaps not entirely clear-cut: but there's certainly ample textual evidence to suggest that these were to be reduced to mere bundles of perceptions too. At any rate, he seems to deny the intelligibility of the notion of material substance, just as much as he does that of mental substance.

"Now since nothing is ever present to the mind but perceptions, and since all ideas are deriv'd from something immediately present to the mind; it follow, that 'tis impossible for us so much as to conceive or form an idea of any thing specifically different from ideas and impressions. Let us fix our attention out of ourselves as much as possible: Let us chace our imagination to the heavens, or to the utmost limits of the universe; we never really advance a step beyond ourselves, nor can conceive any kind of existence, but those perceptions, which have appear'd in that narrow compass." (Treatise 1.2.6)

So it seems that perceptions -- impressions and ideas -- are equally the building blocks of both minds and bodies, at least insofar as either one is intelligible to us. Maybe different kinds of perceptions are involved in the two cases (e.g. presumably only sensual perceptions are involved in the case of bodies, whereas minds might also involve the reflective perceptions of our own internal emotional states). And maybe these perceptions get bundled together in different ways, through different complex webs of relations and associations. But still, it's the individual perceptions themselves that are at the foundation of everything. So, notwithstanding the normal connotations of the terminology, should we really think of these perceptions as being mind-dependent, or as mental entities at all? Don't they have an equal right to be regarded as corporeal, since they do just as much work in establishing bodies for us, as they do in establishing minds? If anything, perhaps we should read Hume neither as an idealist, nor as a materialist, but as a neutral monist.

Here is another take on this important and difficult question. The fact that Hume can find no justification for believing in the external world does not prevent him from believing in it. Nature causes us to believe many things we can find no justification for. "We may well ask, What causes induce us to believe in the existence of body? but 'tis vain to ask, Whether there be body or not? That is a point which we must take for granted in all our reasonings" (Treatise 1.4.2.1). Body for Hume is what continues to exist unperceived and is distinct from mind or perception. So he is not an idealist.