III.iv.Causation in Print Medium as Empirical Phil...
What remains of significance for Hume is that of “relation of causation.”It is not explicitly stated in Shaftesbury’s aesthetics.As a key issue in Hume’s philosophy, it is contoured by a principle of property in Hume’s construction of aesthetics.This is correlated as an epistemological question.Hume writes in the “Appendix”to the Treatise:
Philosophers begin to be reconcil’d to the principle, that we have no idea of external substance, distinct from the ideas of particular qualities.This must pave the way for a like principle with regard to the mind, that we have no notion of it, distinct from the particular perceptions.If perceptions are distinct existences, they form a whole only by being connected together.But connexions among distinct existences are ever discoverable by human understanding.We only feel a connexion or determination of the thought, to pass from one object to another.It follows, therefore, that the thought alonefinds personal identity, when reflecting on the train of past perceptions, that compose a mind, the ideas of them are felt to be connected together, and naturally introduce each other.(Hume 1978:635)
Introspective identity becomes that of an iterable process of being connected.An intellectual labor of “thought”is needed to make a “train,”thus a history of perceptions and ideas so as to maintain a continuity of the “distinct existences.”It creates crevices between fragments and parts, and anticipates what Ira Livingston detects as “disciplinarity”in the “portable panopticon”of the Romantic poetry:“a plaid, a pattern of patterns that works not by being radiated from a center but by generating correspondences among nodes in multiple networks”(Livingston 21).This poetics of processive parts is manifested in a materialist and property-like form through the publication history of the Treatise.Jerome Christensen examines this in details:
Although the first edition was published in 1739 and 1740(and remained unsold in 1756), sections of the Treatise appeared in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding(1748), An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals(1751), and the essay ‘Of Passions’(1752); another portion was intended for the ‘Fourth Dissertation,’ which was never set up in print.The Treatise appeared under the imprint of three publishers:books 1 and 2 were printed by John Noon; book 3 was originally published by Thomas Longmans; and Andrew Millar published all the later reworkings of the Treatise during Hume’s lifetime.(Christensen 1987:122)
In a metaphoric sense, human nature and understanding of an identity is never an organic unity.Rather, it consists of various parts materialized and realized through different compositions.The body of work finds it analogous in the forms of a book and aesthetics of selfhood.It demands intellectual labor and work of writing through a corresponding public organ of the pen.Christensen argues:
It is not the immediate possession of the whole that defines the value of the Treatise for Hume or its interest for anyone else; rather, it is the relation in which those parts stand to one another and to the individual.The scattering of parts, as long as they are held together as property by copyright, is a means of turning scarcity into plenty.(124)
In other words, to establish a relation of this kind is Hume’s strategy to accumulate his capital achieved on a limited labor and life time.The aesthetics upon a fragmentary self—what Shaftesbury calls the “Art of Surgery”of self-dissecting—has obtained a material history in the print medium of the eighteenth century.This poetics about parts constitutes the creation of an emotional selfhood through work of writing.The organization involved in working through constant revisions and publications in the men of letters since the emergence of a print culture reminds of what Antonio Gramsci holds as the difference between the orator and the new intellectual:
The mode of existence of the new intellectual can no longer consist of eloquence, the external and momentary arousing of sentiments and passions, but must consist of being actively involved in practical life, as a builder, an organizer, ‘permanently persuasive’ because he is not purely an orator—and nevertheless superior to the abstract mathematical spirit[43].
As a process, the dispersion of the work of writing and the knowledge it produces is analogous to the constancy of revision, and partition.This uniformed replication allowed by the printing press makes the birth of the modern author.The copyrighted relation to the mechanically reproduced knowledge with the author is what “connects,”which is a relation impossible previous to the print culture.According to Elizabeth Eisenstein,
Scribal culture could not sustain the patenting of inventions or the copyrighting of literary compositions.It worked against the concept of intellectual property rights.It did not lend itself to preserving traces of personal idiosyncrasies, to the public airing of private thoughts, or to any of the forms of silent publicity that have shaped consciousness of self during the past five centuries.(Eisenstein 1979:229-230)
It is part of the historical proposition made through modernity like the financial revolution of the 1690s, during which, as J.G.A.Pocock argues, a crisis in the traditional association of landed property with propriety was precipitated:
Property moved from being the object of ownership and right to being the subject of production and exchange, and … effect of this on the proposition that property was the basis of social personality [which] was to make personality itself explicable in terms of a material and historical process of diversification, refinement and perhaps ultimate decay and renewal.(Pocock 1985:119)(https://www.daowen.com)
The print medium creates a publicity of “personal idiosyncrasies,”“private thoughts,”and “consciousness of self”that maintain the continuity of identity through production(writing), exchange(publication), and reproduction(revision or refinement, or re-edition).
For Hume, the capital realized through the publicity of print medium is that of scarcity, which is unequally distributed through an economy of emotions:“There is no such passion in human minds, as the love of mankind, merely as such, independent of personal qualities”(Hume 1978:309).Emotion exists merely as a reflection of a diversity of personalities.This, however, does not mean that there does not exist universality of human love or understanding:
The skin, pores, muscles, and nerves of a day-labourer are different from those of a man of quality:So are his sentiments, actions and manners.The different stations of life influence the whole fabric,external and internal; and different stations arise necessarily, because uniformly, from the necessary and uniform principles of human nature.Men cannot live without society, and cannot be associated without government.Government makes a distinction of property, and establishes the different ranks of men.This produces industry, traffic, manufactures, law-suits, wars, leagues, alliances, voyages, travels, cities, fleets, ports, and all those other actions and objects, which cause such a diversity, and at the same time maintain such an uniformity in human life.(Hume 1978:402)
Analogous to the train of perceptions, feelings and opinions are made into a bundle of the grammatical issue of identity.The republic is composed of a diversity of careers, between which “a uniformity in human life”is somehow established through association and exchanges in the public.The “distinction of property”and “different ranks of men”work into a sentimental economy of accordance, similar to a processive construction of a personal identity.The necessary mediation from the government takes the “relation of causation”further into a distinction between nature and culture, self and society, external and internal, sensibility and commerce.It forms diversifications and fragments.This point anticipates William James in a moment of scientific psychology of The Principles of Psychology(1890):
In its widest possible sense ...a man’s Self is the sum total of all that he CAN call his, not only his body and his psychic powers, but his clothes and his house, his wife and children, his ancestors and friends, his reputation and works, his lands and horses, and yacht and bank-account[44].(italicized sic)
A self is a composition of ad infinitum partitions.It can claim itself as a property in its structural relation with others, physical and affective, exterior and interior.This probably explains, for Hume, that “History”of his self “shall be short.”It is not merely because of what Hume claims as “difficult for a man to speak long of himself without vanity”(Hume 1985:xxxi), but more significantly, of just a practical impossibility to reiterate all the processes and qualities.Literally, it is beyond human to re-live the life as it has gone through different impressions, perceptions, and ideas in the Humean process of “identity.”Nevertheless, it is beyond “little more than the History of my Writings”(xxxi).
Samuel Weber outlines a critical history upon theatricality as medium in Western tradition.In his short chapter on two contemporary films Being John Malkovich and David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ(1999), he defines “theater”as what “signifies the imposition of borders rather than a representational-aesthetic genre.”“Theatricality,”for him, is a “problematic process of placing, framing, situating rather than as a process of representation”(Weber 2004:315).It is exactly this “little more than the History of my Writings”in Hume that initiates and actualizes a grammatical and fictionalized Humean self-identity, which is a concrete example of objectifying the personal in an exchange economy of the print.After all, it is in between “Home”and “Hume”— “home”and “not being home”—that the name change was made at the first place.This initiation makes possible a realization of theatrical medium in a writing career through its “imposition of borders”and “placing, framing, situating”in a sentimental sociality of sympathy.Theatricality is realized in the presence in print and literary medium, which becomes iterable and iterated in Hume’s empiricism and discourse of experience.This reminds of what Horkheimer and Adorno call the “totalitarianism”of the Enlightenment:
For enlightenment is as totalitarian as any system.Its untruth does not consist in what its romantic enemies have always reproached it for:analytic method, return to elements, dissolution through reflective thought, but instead in the fact that for enlightenment the process is always decided from the start.When in mathematical procedure the unknown becomes the unknown quantity of theequation, this marks it as well-known even before any value is inserted ....Thinking objectifies itself to become an automatic, selfactivating process; an impersonation of the machine that it produces itself so that ultimately the machine can replace it.(Horkheimer and Adorno:24-25)
Writing, like the republic government, becomes a machine to produce and reproduce itself, a thing not being able to be captured through another writing about it.This is why “the history of my Writings”is almost impossible.Knowledge production, through initiating and maintaining a selfhood, is an enlightenment system made possible through a uniform process of pressing and impressing with presence through the print medium.
The “totalitarian”empiricist knowledge production, on the one hand, depends on the correspondence or analogy between sense impressions and mental ideas.On the other hand, it depends on continual and natural exchanges of ideas between one person and another.At the end of the discussion of how sympathy explains our esteem for the rich and powerful, Hume remarks:“The minds of men are mirrors to one another, not only because they reflect each other’s emotions, but also because those rays of passions, sentiments and opinions may be often reverberated, and may decay away by insensible degrees”(Hume 1978:365).Emotions, indeed, play a very significant role in the Humean empiricist epistemology upon selfhood.The affective correspondence with others—sympathy, that is—“appears to be a phenomenon that complicates the ‘mechanistic’ or Newtonian aspects of Hume’s understanding of force, impression, and idea and reverses the unidirectional fading of force”(Pinch 37).The correspondence could be unidirectional, however, once it involves the relation between our own minds and the world of matter.The move is more from exteriority to interiority, from high social power to less so:“No internal impression has an apparent energy, more than external objects have.Since, therefore, matter is confess’d by philosophers to operate by an unknown force, we shou’d in vain hope to attain an idea of force by consulting our own minds”(Hume 1978:633).This particular correspondence is situated in a particular relation of power, as Hume puts it in one of his ethical thought experiments:
’Tis evident, that tho’ all passions pass easily from one object to another related to it, yet this transition is made with greater facility, where the more considerable object is first presented, and the lesser follows it, than when this order is revers’d, and the lesser takes precedence.Thus ’tis more natural for us to love the son upon account of the father, than the father upon account of the son; the servant for the master, than the master for the servant; the subject for the prince, than the prince for the subject.(341-342)
Or, as he explains in such terms:“… our passions, like other objects, descend with greater facility than they ascend”(221-222).Passions, like other materials, are more of communicative attitudes than of subjective feelings.They are maintained through a system of hierarchy and order, not without the trace of the eighteenth-century “great chain of being[45]”.It is an issue of impression and force upon the mind, which are propertylike regarding their significances to form a Humean identity.At another level, for Hume, passion is invested in labor in a democratic sense, which, in turn, produces property[46].There is a form of literary labor “that annexes it to commodity production under the rubric of passion”(Christensen 1987:100), as suggested in Hume’s essay “Of Commerce”:“Everything in the world is purchased by labour; and our passions are the only causes of labour”(Hume 1985:261).Passion, as causes of literary labor, is put into the circulation of literary commodities, and the neutralizing literary market serves as the only standard to judge.It makes historical sense to situate Hume’s ambivalence and his grammatical issue of personal identity in a society that begins to be dominated by a modern market economy.