Ping Pong 16: The Passionate Moralist
In the last Rant, Hume’s very remarkable take on reality was examined. Reality, he claims is something which I borrow from the unseen agencies of the world. It is therefore something one might possess but does not own, something always lent. However Hume goes on to say that this is only half of what fills my mind. The other half is possessed by the passions. Passions differ from reality in two key ways. On the one hand they contain within themselves their own locus of intensity. On the other this locus is somehow generated within ourselves. Or perhaps better, what we call ourselves at the deepest level is the ability to generate this intense series of feelings. We can therefore be immediately said to own passions and to be constituted by that owning. A further five points follow on from these last two points which I will consider in detail below. However before I do that, another aspect of Hume’s argument also needs to be quickly addressed. For Hume, the fact that passions own humanity (or that humanity is the owning of passions), offers real hope for the world. His argument is that, ripping across the passions are certain vectoral lines, which can sweep up wodges or agglomerations of humanity, impelling them to feel (and therefore to be) in the same manner. What is more these lines radiate out from any one point of agreement, sweeping up to a greater or lesser extent, people outside the initial agglomeration, until out at the outer rim all of humanity could be caught up within the same series of passions. This process of radiation out from shared feeling, and this ability to share feelings, to own them together and indefinitely is for Hume the essence of morality. To be moral is therefore to feel, and to feel together. An argument I will return to only once the nature of the passions have been further defined.
The Five points which clarify the nature of the Humean Passions are as follows: i) Passions take on the guise of reality; ii) Passions have no beginning and no end; iii) Passions are intensive, and so each passion contains a galaxy of other passions, waiting to be pulled out from it; iv) Passions are vectors, giving the world a direction or speed; v) Finally humanity is firmly if rather problematically contained within their passions (and not the other way around). Each point will now be tackled in turn.
Firstly, passions are not something that the mind keeps apart from reality. On the contrary, Hume suggests, every reality is infused with passionate intensity. This intensity is moreover by and large indiscernible from the glamour borrowed from reality itself. Perceptions therefore involve an element which is genuinely lent from the external world, but also another element which is internally generated within the mind. Moreover there is nothing stopping this second element from differing from individual to individual. Each mind will therefore to a degree, generate its own set of realities from the same series of perceptions. Thence it is the nature of most reality to confuse perception and passion. Without the former it might not exist, and yet without the latter it is certain that it could not be resolved in the way that it currently is. Nor is there for Hume any easy (initial) communication between differing points in such realities. If I generate a different set of feelings to you, the world really is different for us, and it will be with only the most elaborate and careful of vocabularies that we will ever come to communicate with one another again…
The deep interconnection of passion and reality is not native to Hume (one finds it in Leibniz). But where Hume is original, is that he opposes this schemata to reality in itself (as something lent). I form passions, and generate within them a mechanism which will not only give me my world, but also assert in that giving, a right to ownership of that world. That is, as I own my passions (or are owned by them) I give myself my world as my own. Passions fundamentally give us then, the ability to own the world as our own. This ability is one of course that we have, since Hume’s Day, hollowed out more and more. In his day the means of ownership lay in religion and in culture, while for us it lies in advertising and ‘reality TV’. These elements of modernity create a world by inspiring sets of feeling, passions about the everyday, which then infuse our very grasp on reality, and make other worlds so very unconceivable. The problem then with reality TV is not that it is voyeuristic rubbish, but rather that it fabricates a reality, a reality which its participants (viewers) then share, and which distorts other more flexible takes upon the world.
Secondly, passions have no logical beginning and no termination point. Hume sets his mind against any notion of origin. Infants are therefore awash with passions, and are no blank canvas on which experience can be simply written. Our minds come into the world passionate, and we merely develop or unwind these passions. In effect therefore we always have a passionate world, and the game of living is managing this fact. That is, it is the managing of the development of this world, stopping it becoming too monstrous or too solipsistic.
The logic of the last point is that at every phase of humanity there is a tendency to seal up a nice little world within a discreet package of the mind, as My World, My passions, My feelings, My Life. Nor does Hume condemn such a move - he merely wants to remind us of two things. On the one hand, that this package will at every point feel self-contained and complete (with perhaps one or to ‘oddities allowed’). As individuals we might develop reality from infant to adult to elder, and yet it will never feel that way. Or again objectively a society might be in state of flux, and yet we not grasp the fact. On the other hand, Hume wants to remind us that every such conjunction is essentially arbitrary, and therefore we should not believe in it to the exclusion of other possible realities. Moreover these two points are clearly articulated one against the other. One of the strangenesses of our current condition is the fact that the science on global warming is terrifying. Our world (but not the planet) really might be in peril. And yet this fact really has not got through the passionate walls that define that reality. And yet this last point is not necessarily bad, as if those passionate walls were torn down, or replaced with terror, the reality we might then generate might not, of itself be much better at dealing with our current plight than the world which we currently have. The Problem of getting the public interested in global warming is therefore a problem of getting them interested in a constructive way.
Thirdly, each passion is intensive and complex in itself. Hume is very clear about two points. On the one hand each passion will contain numerous other passions as white light contains colours. To be in love is therefore to be gripped by a joy or infused with a jealousy. Passions will therefore, unless stabilized, whizz the mind in a witch ride of feelings, as one complex passion conjures up a galaxy of other feelings.
On the other hand, Hume asserts that it is a mistake to assume that passions are simply bound by perceptions and therefore by simply defined triggers. I might be anxious, and that anxiety have no discernible cause. That is just what I am: or better it is what my mind is given to me as doing. Or better, this anxiety is created through subterranean splittings of feelings, and interlinking of like ideas within the mind. I am therefore anxious because of a constellation of unique events. Be that as it may, Hume says the problem is never about origins, so much as resolution. When I am gripped by a stubborn affect, I will not care about the elaborate mental gymnastics which got me there, but rather I want to deal with the feeling itself. One does this, Hume contends, by interlinking what feelings one has with one’s current perceptions, and then using these perceptions (and the wider passionate world that embraces these feelings) to mostly contain and explain that feeling. I limit my anxiety with a cause (which may or may not have something to do with it) and so manage it. Or else I contain it within a wider passion (say love) in which it is a mere bit player. Here Hume has no doubt a great lesson for our times. The point of a passion is not to take it too seriously, for if you do, you will find a galaxy of dark causes for it (that is perceptions which it links to), and a galaxy of reasons to maintain its presence within the mind. Far better to contain it within trivial feelings or even seek to convert it into other more productive feelings.
Fourthly each passion will add a direction to its world. That is, passions are never neutral, and therefore assert an interest into the world. The world I feel is therefore a world I want or not as the case may be. It is a world in which desire finds its home. Thence I will not only own a world, but will also have a series of feelings associated with that ownership. The world and our desires i.e. the world of our wants, are given therefore in the same throw. And yet the two remain in themselves distinct. That is, I might, using my limited power of generating passions, create within myself a series of ‘realities’ (I might be mad or a solipsist). And yet if I do so, there will always come a point when my finite abilities are all used up in the generation of intense passionate-realities and yet the limitless power of the reality itself remains as it was before. The intense inner world that I will have generated will then risk collapsing in the face of the external lent vivacity of the world. The world is therefore given to me in a series of interests, and yet the vivacious reality itself remains distinct from these concerns. And the game of running a mind is to ensure that the two never come too far out of kilter.
Fifthly, humanity constructs their own notion of the self within these passions. Hume argues (as I have considered in detail in another Rant: ‘Why must I have an identity’) that the mind only comes to feel itself to be, and therefore able to contain its own feelings, through pride. Each mind is therefore only able to know that it is, through its effects in the world. The effects being either in the form of the physical things which it owns, or the actions that it does. Minds therefore cannot know themselves, save through the feelings that their complex interactions with the world create within themselves. What makes then, pride so different, what then allows it to form a notion of a self (or at least to support it) is that alone of all the passions, it is naturally self contained. That is, pride lacks the tendency found in other passions to split into other passions and so complicate the mind by dragging it elsewhere. Or perhaps better, when it does split, the feelings it which produces, are immediately comprehended within the passion of pride.
The world when one includes passions, is therefore, for Hume a highly volatile, highly problematic place. Not only will these passions be (to a degree at least) set against the nature of the real (the vivacious) itself; but also and just as problematically, the stability of passions is distinctly volatile. However, Hume suggests there is a deep solution to this problem. Given that humans are naturally internal to their passions (and not the other way around), there is nothing stopping two humans from very different backgrounds, really sharing the same passions. Additionally this last point is all the more true when one remembers that the only element that does stop this sharing, is experience (that is, the particular cases in which any one passion is deployed), and experience is necessarily shared (as it is only ever lent to any one of us). There is nothing therefore integrally stopping humanity from sharing its passions.
At this point however, Hume wants to sound a note of caution. While essentially there might be nothing which stops this pooling, there is in effect a very real block. The block of the everyday. That is, each perception-passion conjunction is giving us our own world, which as such is unique to ourselves alone (wherever it might theoretically or abstractly lead). Thence one might very easily define a goal in the abstract and the universal (world peace or an absence of want and suffering) and yet one does not immediately know how to proceed towards that goal. Hume however, has here a suggestion. He argues that the only viable place to start, is the world in which we live. One needs then to take the elements of one’s own life as it is already shared by one’s family, and one’s community, and think on the nature of this necessary sharing. One needs then to start with one’s own self interest, and to understand how that interest already comprehends others. It is only through these relations, which are immediately before the mind, that one can hope to understand the sense of how humans share feelings. That is, how humans are able to want the same thing, and through that want, to begin to effect it. Morality starts this with local centres of self interest.
And yet these interests are clearly only a start. On the one hand, it will certainly be the case that these self interests will naturally remain the strongest element in the mind (and Hume lauds this fact as it gives the mind a much needed stability). On the other hand, the instability of passions and the vivacity of perceptions will now encourage the mind to inter-connect its own shared world with other humans beyond its initial orbit. It will therefore look for what it shares with them, and for ways in which it can co-operate with them for mutual benefit. Morality is therefore constructed across the world, from loci of self interests to loci of self interests, in an evolving patchwork of shared concerns.
Morality is therefore, never something simply innate or natural. It must rather be gradually and very carefully constituted within and across a world. However, at this point Hume’s own world came up against a hitch within his teaching. The manufacture of the loci of self interests became problematic when the elements which they involved became more diverse and more complex. One might then manufacture such interests on the level of the community or perhaps the country (where one has the additional help of a shared history, and therefore a partially pooled set of passions) and yet one cannot so easily manufacture it, at levels beyond these. Now Hume no doubt retaliated that this failure did not matter much as what mattered was always the local. The failure to create universal agglomerations of feeling simply reflected the fact that these general agglomerations were of little real import.
And yet this answer failed to carry conviction in his day (let alone in ours). For it failed to grasp the fact that the world which could afford relatively self sealed communities or nations had by the eighteenth century been lost, as nations and continents were bound up in complex global interactions. One simply could not afford to wait for nice little patterns of self interest to emerge across the world (all the more so if these patterns were in themselves the least effective elements within the mind). One needed a solution far quicker than that. That is, one needed a way to immediately value collective interest, and to put a price on community actions. That is, one needed capitalism, and it is to this move, and the work of Adam Smith, that the next Rant will turn. The irony of course for us, but also for Hume, is that whilst he might have very accurately diagnosed the nature of the modern world and might even be right about the eventual solution as to how one lives in a complex global community, no one has had (or can allow themselves) the patience to find out! Rather, we are swept up by the fragmentary world of the passions, into the comprehensive system of global capitalism, and thereby forced to move away from Hume with his erudite humanity, into the world of his great friend (and arch moralist) Adam Smith.
