On Jennifer Frey's Criticism of Hume's rejection of the Monkish Virtues, p. 2
Last week (recall) I started an open-ended series of posts on the popular writings of Jennifer Frey, the inaugural dean of the Honors College at The University of Tulsa and professor of philosophy. I do so because her work is refreshingly free from groupthink and administrative jargon, and because her vision is consequential.
A few years ago Frey was part of a symposium on Zena Hitz’s (2020) Lost in Thought (a book I much admire and have also written on here; recall also here; and here). Frey also admires Hitz’s book. And in her remarks, Frey uses the occasion to criticize David Hume and his legacy. Here’s how she starts her essay,
In his Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, David Hume attacked the “the whole train of monkish virtues”—from fasting, penance, self-denial, and humility, to the silence and solitude of a contemplative life. Hume, a prominent member of the Enlightenment vanguard in Scotland, sought to free his fellow Europeans from “the delusive glosses of superstition and false religion” promulgated by “gloomy and hair-brained enthusiasts.” Consequently, he argued that silence and solitude were not virtues at all but “dismal” vices, rejected by men of good sense, since they “neither advance a man’s fortune in the world, nor render him a more valuable member of society; neither qualify him for the entertainment of company, nor increase his power of enjoyment.” As European man entered a new, scientific era, Hume thought that social utility and pleasure as the only rational measures for determining which qualities of character could possibly help individuals and societies flourish.
Zena Hitz’s delightful and compelling new book, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life, is a welcome rejoinder to Hume’s influential critique. While she is clearly an enthusiast for the value of contemplation, gloomy and hair-brained Hitz is not. She seamlessly weaves together memoir, sharp philosophical analysis, literary and art criticism, and intellectual history, to make the compelling case that the cultivation of our inner lives, which requires many of the monkish virtues that Hume dismissed, is fundamental to authentic human flourishing.—Frey (July 3, 2020) “The Monkish Virtues in Times of Crisis” Law & Liberty
To avoid confusion, to the best of my knowledge (but memory is fallible) Hitz does not mention Hume in Lost in Thought. However, the conditions that allow contemplation to be cultivated and flourish are a rather important theme of Hitz’s book.
I was a bit surprised by Frey’s choice of polemical target in her response to Hitz’s book. After all, Hume is a self-described friend of the liberal arts, and so one might expect Frey to see him as an ally. In fact, part of his own (rather immodest) sense of his originality, is that in his (1741) essay, “Of the Delicacy of Taste and Passion,” Hume has offered “a new reason for cultivating a relish in the liberal arts.” (This reason is its role in the development of a sound judgment.) And the liberal arts, in turn, presuppose the cultivation of leisure. (See Hume’s essay on “Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences.”) In fact, Hume’s defense of commercial society (and this is echoed by his friend Adam Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments.) is that it makes possible the flourishing of the liberal arts and sciences (not just the ‘servile’ or instrumental sciences).
Now, there cannot be any doubt that Hume was a critic of what he called ‘superstition’ by which he meant — let’s be forthright about it — Catholicism. He thought this one of the false religions.* In the context of the passage on the monkish virtues that Frey quotes, Hume is clearly treating Catholic saints as insufferable human beings worthy to be social outcasts.
To be sure, often Hume’s bigotry toward Catholicism (a popular stance in his social context) is a thinly disguised fig leaf toward a critique of Church of England and Church of Scotland (more dangerous enterprise). It seems right to say that for Hume ‘social utility and pleasure’ are rather important features of character that help individuals and society flourish.
However, I have some unease about the suggestion that Hume — notoriously the philosopher of feeling — embraces any ‘rational measures’ and that Frey has characterized them correctly. For, it’s notable that Frey treats Hume here without any mention of sympathy, which is rather important to Hume’s own efforts at distinguishing himself from (say) Hobbes and central to his account of human and social flourishing.
Let’s leave aside sympathy in Hume’s thought. Is Hume a critic of contemplation, as Frey implies? It seems natural to suppose, as Frey does, that if Hume is a critic of the monkish virtues, as he seems to be, then he can’t make room for contemplation and the cultivation of our inner lives (and so authentic human flourishing). Let’s leave this natural supposition as an open question.
At the start of the third volume of his youthful Treatise, David Hume re-inscribes himself as a character in the drama of philosophy in an easily overlooked way:
The main point of the passage is, of course, that our interest in morality may risk what we now call ‘confirmation bias’ in the ontology and epistemology of the subject. But the secondary point is that the interest in the topic also nudged Hume — the authorial persona of the Treatise — to develop more fully what he calls an ‘abstruse philosophy.’ According to the start of Hume’s subsequent Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (or First Enquiry), abstruse philosophy, “cannot enter into business and action.” (EHU 1.3)
As an aside, ‘abstruse’ originates in the Latin (abstrudere) for concealed or hidden. So, we may suggest that part of the difficulty in the ‘abstruse’ philosophy is its tendency to move from the surface of things to hidden issues. That’s not natural territory for an empiricist like Hume.
Be that as it may, Hume explicitly suggests that his work goes against the spirit of the age in which reading is treated as a mere amusement, or diversionary in character. By contrast, the kind of reading his work demands from his reader requires “considerable degree of attention to be comprehended.” Now, this may not presuppose contemplation or a cultivated inner life, but it does seem to require silence and study.
Now, obviously, this passage may be a taken as a kind of rhetoric, inviting the studious reader along analogous to stamping a document with ‘top secret.’ But Hume here echoes also a by then familiar trope. For example, in his ‘Preface’ to the Reader, at the start of his (1641) Meditations, Descartes writes (in Elizabeth Haldane’s translation),
without however expecting any praise from the vulgar and without the hope that my book will have many readers. On the contrary, I should never advise anyone to read it excepting those who desire to meditate seriously with me, and who can detach their minds from affairs of sense, and deliver themselves entirely from every sort of prejudice. I know too well that such men exist in a very small number.
Now, nobody can treat Descartes as a critic of contemplation and a critic of the cultivation of the inner lives. Even so, even an only partially attentive reader of Descartes’ Passions of the Soul could discern that he was no friend of the monkish virtues. For example, in it, humility is treated as a vice by Descartes.
To simplify where we are: I have implied that Frey has moved rather quickly, too quickly, from the idea that if one rejects the monkish virtues (as Hume does) one must also reject the conditions that allow for contemplation and the cultivation of inner livers which — let’s stipulate — is an essential ingredient in human flourishing.
At this point one may interject on Frey’s behalf that what Hume is after in his defense of the liberal arts is “delicacy of taste.” And the reason for this is that, as Frey implies, Hume sees in discussions rooted in taste and conversations about taste an important social glue; they are conducive to “love and friendship.” And even if one were able to acquit Hume from the charge that he instrumentalizes love and friendship from the perspective of social utility, being a good friend (or lover) need not involve cultivation of inner self. After all, for Hume there is no self to be found, beyond a bunch of fleeting impressions. Hume’s philosophy, then, does not provide an anti-dote to the instability and impermanence of our social worlds, but grounds it in his metaphysics of self!
As regular readers know, I feel some kinship with Hume’s skeptical temper. But I have grown increasingly uneasy about his partisanship on behalf of an expansive civilization (recall here and here; here); and here). So, I don’t think I would want to acquit Hume from being one of the intellectual sources of the pathologies of our age. But that’s for another time.
But as I hinted above in my reminder that Hume presents himself as an abstruse thinker, I think it would be a mistake to treat Hume as a critic of silence and solitude in the cultivation of a contemplative stance. After all, Hume’s own philosophy leads to an existential solitude that is the effect of self-cultivation. I quote the passage of the Conclusion of Book 1 of the Treatise:
“I am first affrighted and confounded with that forelorn solitude, in which I am plac'd in my philosophy, and fancy myself some strange uncouth monster, who not being able to mingle and unite in society, has been expell'd all human commerce, and left utterly abandon'd and disconsolate…When I turn my eye inward, I find nothing but doubt and ignorance…Every step I take is with hesitation, and every new reflection makes me dread an error and absurdity in my reasoning” (1.4.7.2)
This is indeed no defense of the monkish virtues. But that’s because Hume recognizes that true solitude is disconsolate. But the point of the passage is not to reject the inward turn, as Hume calls “the intense view [that]…has so wrought upon me, and heated my brain,” (1.4.7.8), but, to enact as a dramatic persona or to be an exemplar to others, to make transparent its cost or price because there is, alas, an addictive quality to intense self-study. (Hume’s science of man is not trivially intro-spective.) For Hume has experienced that the solitary cultivation of contemplation risks resulting in “philosophical melancholy and delirium.”
Now, some readers of Hume take him to advocate “amusement” such as “a game of back-gammon” and banter with “friends.” (Treatise, 1.4.7.9) In so far as these are immediate antidotes to the acute effects of melancholy and delirium this may be true. But I don’t think this is the moral he teaches on how to proceed in intellectual self-cultivation (which he does not stop at the end of Book 1 of the Treatise). After all, he starts his Treatise (in the “Advertisement”) not by claiming intellectual independence of the cultivated self, but rather as intertwined with a wider public.
I think lurking here in Hume’s plight is a hard-won insight that we also find in Hitz. It’s one thing to withdraw from the conventions or platitudes of society and follow the argument come what may like a fearless solo-traveler. As many angst-ridden bookish teenagers discover, this is the route toward madness and depression of all kinds if one lacks a durable connection to another.
By contrast, the contemplative or isolated reader does have a companion, and so a connection:
The isolation comes from refusing the terms of the social world, diminishment and use. It involves—essentially, I think—a real connection, one not based on use, with other human beings, whether living fellow inquirers or dead authors. So intellectual life nurtures genuine forms of community, as is hinted by the “heart for humanity” and the “kinship with the whole human race” that Mary Smith recognized in the authors and then found in herself.
The human connection that a reader finds with authors, living and dead, also shapes the connections forged between flesh-and-blood people engaged in intellectual activity in common. (Hitz, Lost in Thought, 104-5)
So, in defense of the monkish virtues one can say there may be monkish communities with practices that may provide the structure and safety net for true cultivation of inner life. Hitz is surely right about this.
Hume’s rhetoric went too far in seeming to reject all the monkish virtues altogether. But I think Hume is better read as rejecting the unity of the Monkish virtues when they reinforce each other (that is, when the act as “the whole train”). The individual status of some the ‘monkish’ dispositions may fare better. In fact, Hume explicitly acknowledges that he cultivated some of the monkish virtues themselves, and his philosophy is the product of them.
*This suggests that he did defend what he called ‘true religion’. The nature and content of this religion need not concern us here.