III.iii.Personal History of Writing in a Grammatic...
This strategy is also manifested in the autobiographic piece “My Own Life,”the last essay that Hume wrote in his life.At the beginning of its last paragraph[29], we read:“To conclude historically with my own character.I am, or rather was(for that is the style I must now use in speaking of myself, which emboldens me the more to speak my sentiments); I was, I say ….[30]”The literary death of an “I”or “Home”makes a transactional scarcity in the commerce of writing.It actualizes Hume’s scribbling on “many a Quire of Paper, in which there is nothing contained but my own Inventions,”which is put at the beginning of his Treatise.Writing, thereby, becomes an aesthetic tool for self-fashioning in an economy of capitalism.In his final composition Hume writes retrospectively:
It is difficult for a man to speak long of himself without vanity; therefore, I shall be short.It may be thought an instance of vanity that I pretend at all to write my life; but this Narrative shall contain little more than the History of my Writings; as indeed, almost all my life has been spent in literary pursuits and occupations[31].
Roy Pascal is not accurate when he comments that
Hume’s Life, important historically as one of the first extended accounts by a writer of his literary progress, fails to reach greatness because of Hume’s unwillingness to tell us of anything but the facts directly relevant to his publications; from it one could scarcely guess at the content of his Essays[32].
It is exactly in this “little more than the History of my Writings,”this writing argues, that we have a theatrical imposition in print medium to satisfy the created discrepancy.This is a social consequence of moving away from a society that was dominated by “strategy rather than economy[33]”into a literary culture of modern market economy.It reflects a shift from the primogeniture system into the literary career marketplace.Ronald Paulson argues that Joseph Addison
modulates the austere virtue of civic humanism into politeness, and extends the amenities across a broader spectrum of society, noting that the ‘man of a Polite Imagination’ feels ‘greater Satisfaction’ in the Prospect of Fields and Meadows, than another does in the Possession.(Paulson 1996:50)
For Paulson, this aesthetic pleasure is “precisely because it is not his own property and he sees in it the perspective of commerce and paper money, rather than inheritance, upkeep, and tenantry”(50-51).In Hume, this sense of property in representation through work of writing is satisfied not merely in “the perspective of commerce and paper money,”but more in inscribing emotions through working as part of an interiorized and thus propertied selfhood.
This mapping of interior emotions is a means to socialize the relation between the writer and its public readers.It is made very clear in one of the passages taken from the Treatise:
We may infer from them [the fleeing men], that the uneasiness of being contemn’d depends on sympathy, and that sympathy depends on the relation of objects to ourselves; since we are most uneasy under the contempt of persons, who are both related to us by blood, and contiguous in place.Hence we seek to diminish this sympathy and uneasiness by separating these relations, and placing ourselves in a contiguity to strangers, and at a distance from relations.(Hume 1978:322)
The local sympathy from blood relations or geographic closeness is rather detrimental, and thus makes a salubrious sympathy at distances more necessary.This role of benevolence of sympathy upon the body, whether of oneself or others, is among the moral philosophical agenda in the Scottish Enlightenment.For instance, Francis Hutcheson(1694—1746) takes sympathy as a fact that is included in his anti-Hobbesian doctrine.Unlike a warring-state between individuals, benevolence is natural to humans for Hutcheson.By sympathy or compassion, as Hutcheson writes:
We are dispos’d to study the Interest of others, without any Views of private Advantage ….Every Mortal is made uneasy by any grievous Misery he sees another involv’d in, unless the Person be imagin’d evil, in a moral Sense:Nay, it is almost impossible for us to be unmov’d, even in that Case.(qtd.in Broadie 160)
In Hume, the provincial “strategy”gives way to economically relational “contiguity to strangers.”Or, “ourself … is in reality nothing”(Hume 1978:340).What wants in geographic and physical “reality”needs fueling in global and representational “fiction”through writing, by which a “freely”self-actualizing personality is achieved.This economy of scarcity or a fictionalized self of sentimental deprivation is captured by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in their analysis of the capitalist deformation of desire:the “deliberate creation of lack as a function of the market economy is the art of a dominant class[34].”Thus the Humean self becomes a necessity of production in a literary career in the early commerce of capitalism, not that much away from his original occupation in a merchant’s office.With those “as delirious and dismal as himself”and “in a contiguity to strangers, and at a distance from relations,”the Humean self is always in the practice of a “process,”to put it in the term that Northrop Frye used to characterize the artistic formations of the “age of sensibility[35].”It is a career of the men of letters, whose practice, like the society whose economy his career reflects, is “maintained at a continuous present by various devices of repetition[36].”A repetition of the imposition of a fictional self into a system of rational abstraction is a move “from observed particulars to general claims about universals like ‘man’ by claiming that their universals were somehow derived from an additive process that identified the ‘greatest good of the greatest number’ by looking at the philosopher’s(representative) self”(Poovey 149).For the British and more frequently Scottish moral philosophers of the eighteenth century, “the problem epitomized by identity becomes the problem of philosophy”(201).“Considering myself as a man in general, [I must] forget, if possible, my individual being and my peculiar circumstances”(239), as Hume writes in “Of the Standard of Taste[37].”
Jerome Christensen argues that, for Hume and his fellow men of letters, “the general term that subsumed ‘discourse’ and ‘conversation’ was ‘correspondence’”and it is that “in the empiricist epistemology knowledge depends on the correspondence or analogy between sense impressions and mental ideas”(Christensen 1987:10).Mary Poovey examines Hume’s repudiation of experimental moral philosophy and his turn to the genre of the essay writing, and writes that
eighteenth century attempts to produce knowledge about a universal subject through experiment coexisted with another kind of knowledge project, which sought not so much to generate facts about a universal subjectivity as to engage readers’ subjective response in the service of producing something else, which eighteenth-century writers variously called conversation, moral emulation, and selfimprovement.(Poovey 150)(https://www.daowen.com)
The concluding part of Book I of Hume’s Treatise(1739) suggests a case of this experiment with conversation, the epistemological correlation it promotes, and the sympathetic sociality such experiment and knowledge production build.Hume writes:
But setting aside some metaphysicians of this kind, I may venture to affirm of the rest of mankind, that they are 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.Our eyes cannot turn in their sockets without varying our perceptions.Our thought is still more variable than our sight; and our other senses and faculties contribute to this change; nor is there any single power of the soul, which remains unalterably the same, perhaps for one moment.The mind is a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, re-pass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations.(Hume 1978:252-253)
Self is put into a flux of theatrical performance.The physical phenomena accessible to sight and perceptions succeeding each other “with an inconceivable rapidity”contribute to a constantly altering soul at any moment.To put it in another way, the identitarian existence becomes an experiment through its relation with various “others”to encounter “in a contiguity to strangers.”Rather than realized in(moral) philosophical self-reflection, this self is more like a procession illustrated in a natural philosophy laboratory experiment that is indispensable with representations[38]:
We must therefore glean up our experiments in this science from a cautious observation of human life, and take them as they appear in the common course of the world, by men’s behavior in company, in affairs, and in their pleasures.Where experiments of this kind are judiciously collected and compared, we may hope to establish on them a science, which will not be inferior in certainty, and will be much superior in utility to any other of human comprehension.(Hume 1978:xviii-xix)
Self-reflection and premeditation yield to observation of “others,”which is made possible by a burgeoning quantity of anthropological materials supplied through traders, travelers, missionaries, and colonial administrators in the century[39].The treatise illustrates a sympathetic “science”to experiment with general human understanding “in company, in affairs, and in their pleasures.”This ethnographical approach to experiential data as a necessary extension of self is expressed more explicitly in Hume’s An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding:
Records of wars, intrigues, factions, and revolutions are so many collections of experiments, by which the politician or moral philosopher fixes the principles of his science, in the same manner as the physician or natural philosopher becomes acquainted with thenature of plants, minerals, and other external objects, by the experiments which he forms concerning them[40].
Selfhood is put under the gaze of a medical physician and a natural philosopher.It is, in a sense, objectified.Thus, subjectivity is achieved as a visual sympathy or understanding.It is theatrically established, and always remains in fluidity of conversable exchanges.
In a contemporary sense, this theatrical metaphor reminds of the theatrical spatiality of John Malkovich’s body in Spike Jonze’s film Being John Malkovich(1999).In the film, theatricality is also used to indicate the constant flux of the mind in the sense of visuality and ethnography of selfhood.The dispossessed human body of Malkovich’s is similarly “no longer a self-contained vessel.”It is “the vehicle of a no less self-contained soul”and does not demarcate “the internal selfcontainment of a subject”either.Thus it becomes “a kind of apartment house or, better, a dwelling for transients,”“as a temporary container and as an observation post, something like a loge in a theater”(Weber 2004:317).In the cases of Hume and this film, a strong sense of theatricality is displayed through the body and mind site.This reminds of Walter Benjamin’s writing about Brecht’s Epic Theater, in which he describes the actor’s ability to “fall out of one’s role artistically”and by implication to “fall”into another one(qtd.in Weber 2004:317).The site of Malkovich’s body is “thus the site of a struggle for ‘possession’ in which expropriation and reappropriation alternate”(Weber 2004:318), as Samuel Weber puts it.The theatrical mind stage of Hume’s is not a tabula rasa either.It is a social stage representing a causal continuity as a performative and articulating an identity.Hume famously writes:
...all the nice and subtile questions concerning personal identity can never possibly be decided, and are to be regarded rather asgrammatical than as philosophical difficulties.Identity depends on the relations of ideas; and these relations produce identity, by means of that easy transition they occasion.But as the relations, and the easiness of the transition may diminish by insensible degrees, we have no just standard, by which we can decide any dispute concerning the time, when they acquire or lose a title to the name of identity.All the disputes concerning the identity of connected objects are merely verbal, except so far as the relation of parts gives rise to some fiction or imaginary principle of union ....(Hume 1978:262)
Out of the grammatical as well as the verbal, Hume composes a literary career.The sense of temporality in the transfer of different perceptions and relations of ideas regarding the organization of an identity leads to “the History of my Writings”(emphasis mine.):“Thus we feign the continu’d existence of the perceptions of our senses, to remove the interruption; and run into the notion of a soul, and self, and substance, to disguise the variation.”Hume admits in the very grammar of his sentence:
I cannot compare the soul more properly to any thing than to a republic or commonwealth in which the several members are united by the reciprocal ties of government and subordination, and give rise to other persons, who propagate the same republic in the incessant changes of its parts.And as the same individual republic may not only change its members, but also its laws and constitutions; in like manner the same person may vary his character and disposition, as well as his impressions and ideas, without losing his identity.Whatever changes he endures, his several parts are still connected by the relation of causation.And in this view our identity with regard to the passions serves to corroborate that with regard to the imagination, by the making our distant perceptions influence each other, and by giving us a present concern for our past or future pains or pleasures.(Hume 1978:261)
The self is more like a segregation of different parts, which may change with relations and transitions of ideas.As a “fiction or imaginary principle of union,”the identity issue is dependent upon “the relation of causation”to construct a future history.This sense of a multiplying self into segments takes an introspective interior dialogue as a means of selfgovernment.It might not have stricken Hume’s contemporaries as strange.Through a corroboration of “the passions”and “the imagination,”it is part of new science of aesthetics of the century.Shaftesbury and his Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times(1711) is one of its beginnings.For Shaftesbury, an introspective self resembles the “art or science”of surgery.Similar to Hume’s, it suggests a social process of interaction:
Accordingly, if it be objected against the above-mention’d Practice, and Art of Surgery, “That we can no-where find such a meek Patient, with whom we can in reality make bold, and for whom nevertheless we are sure to preserve the greatest Tenderness and Regard”:I assert the contrary; and say, for instance, That we have each of us Our Selves to practise on.“Mere Quibble!(you’ll say:) For who can thus multiply himself into two Persons, and be his own Subject?Who can properly laugh at himself, or find in his heart to be either merry or severe on such an occasion?”Go to the Poets, and they will present you with many Instances.Nothing is more common with them, than this sort of Soliloquy.A Person of profound Parts, or perhaps of ordinary Capacity, happens, on some occasion, to commit a Fault.He is concern’d for it.He comes alone upon the Stage; looks about him, to see if any body be near; then takes himself to task, without sparing himself in the least.You wou’d wonder to hear how close he pushes matters, and how thorowly(sic) he carrys(sic) on the business of Self-dissection.By virtue of this Soliloquy he becomes two distinct Persons.He is Pupil and Preceptor.He teaches, and he learns[41].
The poetic soliloquy is a theatrical skill for self-examination, which creates a self-dissecting interiority.For Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury—“devoted disciple of Renaissance neo-Platonism”(Eagleton 1990:3), it is a punitive as well as pedagogical necessity.This surgical discourse is part of the emergent aesthetics of the eighteenth century, “a creative turn to the sensuous body, as well as an inscribing of that body with a subtly oppressive law”(Eagleton 1990:9).The split and fragmentation leads to what Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel(1770—1831) proposes as the modern “Spirit in Self-Estrangement”in his Phenomenology of Mind[42].Different social and political positions are “united by the reciprocal ties of government and subordination,”and would enhance a different somatic body of the republican self.