Hume Studies

Hume Studies Volume XX, Number 2, November 1994, pp. 195-210 Symposium A version of this paper was presented at the symposium on A Progress of Sentiments by Annette C. Baier, held at the Pacific Division Meetings of the American Philosophical Association, Los Angeles, March 1994. Reason, Reflection, and Reductios DAVID OWEN In "An Anthropologist on Mars," Oliver Sacks tells the story of Temple Grandin, an autistic woman who has not overcome but worked around her condition to become a successful animal facilities designer and Assistant Professor in the Animal Sciences Department at Colorado State University at Fort Collins. Almost entirely lacking in Humean sympathy, and severely deficient in Humean passions, she has learned how to function by almost exclusive use of reason and inference. Through observation and experience, she has learned "how to behave" with other people "without having much personal perception of how other people felt—the nuances, the social subtleties involved." She takes no pleasure in Shakespeare because of "her failure to empathize with the characters, to follow the intricate play of motive and intention." "Much of the time," she said, "I feel like an anthropologist on Mars."1 Growing up was a nightmare. At the age of six months, Sacks reports, she started to stiffen in her mother's arms, at ten months to claw her "like a trapped animal....Nonnal contact was almost impossible in these circumstances ." But she developed an intense power of concentration and attention. Her ability to get along with other people is a matter of building up a vast library of experiences over the years...like a library of videotapes , which she could play in her mind...[in order to] predict how people in similar circumstances might act...."It is strictly a logical process," she explained.2 David Owen is at the Department of Philosophy, University of Arizona, 213 Social Sciences Bldg. #27, Tuscon AZ 86721 USA. 196 David Owen Like many autistic people, she is a fan of Star Trek's Data and his predecessor, Mr. Spock. What was lacking, when growing up, was "an implicit knowledge of social conventions and codes, of cultural presuppositions of every sort....Lacking it, she has instead to 'compute' others' feelings and intentions and states of mind, to try to make algorithmic, explicit, what for the rest of us is second nature." She couldn't get along with other children, even after she learned language. "Something was going on between the other kids, something swift, subtle, constantly changing—an exchange of meanings, a negotiation, a swiftness of understanding so remarkable that sometimes she wondered if they were all telepathic."3 Sacks' description of Temple is the closest thing I have come across to a description of what people might be like, and what they would lack, if they were instantiations of pure Humean reason, without the passionate interactions with other people so necessary not just to our social lives but to our entire being. It is arguable that Hume's philosophy can best be seen as a rejection of this conception of a person as a solitary, Cartesian reasoner in favour of the whole person, interacting with his fellows. And no commentator of Hume has stressed, indeed addressed, this aspect of Hume's philosophy with the verve, elegance, comprehensiveness, and persuasiveness of Annette Baier. Baier's A Progress of Sentiments4 is a book that treats Hume's Treatise5 as a whole. The book begins with the last section of Book I of the Treatise, the often neglected but crucial "Conclusion of this book." Baier rightly treats it not just as the despairing rejection of the conception of a person solipsistically reliant solely on calculative reason, but also as the turning point in the Treatise, the stage where Hume starts to consider the "mind all collected within itself" (T 270), ready to forge the science of human nature not simply by concentrating on the understanding but treating people as passionate individuals with social natures. People in general cannot function like Temple; they have and use more than their reason and this affects every aspect of their life, including the cognitive side. In lacking passions, Temple did not simply fail to have certain feelings; she was...