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Abstract
This study of David Hume’s first published work, A Treatise of Human Nature, Books 1-2, explores four overarching themes: First, relations of self-awareness, self-delusion, and self-knowledge; second, the emotions’ positive and negative contributions to human intellectual activity, particularly the pursuit of self-knowledge; third, the dynamic process individuals undergo through the development of their intellectual and emotional capacities; fourth, philosophy as an attempt to actualize human nature’s full intellectual capacity.
After a Preface, commenting on my own interest in this project, the Introduction presents the overarching themes, with some reflection on their contemporary relevance. The first two chapters take up an analysis of Treatise 1, “Of the Understanding.” Chapter 1 draws out Hume’s account of the growth of an individual’s intellectual faculty in order to shed light on the crisis of reason presented in the final section of Treatise 1. At the core of this account is a conception of mastery of nature endemic to the search for increasingly sophisticated understanding, including through philosophy. Chapter 2 shows how Hume’s escape from the crisis offers an alternative to the danger of letting irrational nature master one’s understanding. This alternative, which requires the cooperation of emotional drives with intellectual capacities, I call “curiosity-driven philosophy.” In order to understand more fully the nature of philosophy and the philosopher, Chapter 3 pauses to address the debate about the connection (or purported lack thereof) between the treatment of the understanding in Treatise 1 and the analysis of emotions in Treatise 2: “Of the Passions.”
The fourth and fifth chapters of this study are devoted to an analysis of Treatise 2. Chapter 4 focuses on the emotion of pride, its role in the attainment of self-awareness and the self-delusions this creates, which emotions like sympathy and love seem unable to correct. Chapter 5 turns to the concluding chapter of Treatise 2, “Of Curiosity, or the Love of Truth.” Investigating the significance of curiosity in Hume’s re-conception of philosophy offers insight into the contribution more generally that the emotions can play in intellectual life. An Appendix illustrates further implications of this study for Hume’s corpus as a whole.
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