Hume Studies

Hume Studies Volume 27, Number 2, November 2001, pp. 227-246 The Relation between Literary Form and Philosophical Argument in Hume's Dialogues concerning Natural Religion MARTIN BELL Introduction Philosophers from Plato onwards have always attached importance to the possibilities that differing literary forms give for the expression of philosophical ideas. No one can read Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, or Wittgenstein, for example, without paying attention to how the literary form helps to constitute the philosophical content. Recently there has been renewed interest in the debates that took place in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries on the significance and appropriateness of literary forms for philosophical argument . In the last few years alone there have been major studies of the styles and genres of writing used by Bayle, Locke, Shaftesbury, Berkeley, and Hume.1 This paper is concerned with questions about the relation between the philosophical arguments and the literary form that arise from attempts to read David Hume's Dialogues concerning Natural Religion.2 This debate has been extensive ,3 and I cannot attempt here to discuss all the questions it has raised. I hope only to propose certain issues that seem to me important and so to contribute to the continuation of the debate. I begin with a summary of four types of interpretation of DNR proposed by Jonathan Dancy (op. cit.) (section I). I make some criticisms of his approach Martin Bell is Professor of Philosophy, Department of Politics and Philosophy, The Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, M15 6LL, United Kingdom, e-mail: J.M.Bell@mmu.ac.uk 228 Martin Bell (section II) which center on three points: what is meant by "the design argument "; what Hume poses as the "concern" of DNR; and what is the context of DNR, where "context" is restricted to that provided by Hume's other writings. I then turn to the wider context of the work (section III) drawing particularly on Prince and Malherbe (op. cit.) to consider the importance of Shaftesbury's example to the way in which Hume writes. Dancy seems to regard his four types of interpretation of DNR as mutually exclusive. I suspect that Hume's choice of the form of dialogue served more than one purpose. Prudence, for example, may well have been a part of his motivation, although I agree with Dancy that what he calls the "camouflage" interpretation (see section I) is not the whole story. It is significant that section 11 of the first Enquiry is also a dialogue. The recent work on Shaftesbury by these authors and especially by Rivers4 has helped to make prominent the extent to which Hume was responding to Shaftesbury's theories of dialogue and its relation to philosophy, and through that to a tradition of natural religion to which he was opposed. I have tried to build on the proposals of particularly Dancy and Malherbe and, through making some criticisms of them, to arrive at the proposition of this paper. This is, that in addition to other possible motives such as prudence , Hume had a philosophical reason for using the dialogue form in writing about natural religion which is that, for him, there really is no such thing as natural religion. His dialogue, I shall suggest, is about something that is absent , because for Hume, "natural religion" does not really designate anything. The dialogue form serves to show rather than simply state the absence of the supposed subject of debate. I conclude with a tentative suggestion about a connection between DNR and Kant's investigation of concepts of purpose in the Critique of Teleological Judgment in the Critique of Judgment. It is often said that DNR is a work that we find hard to read because we are not sure what Hume is up to. We look for a message, and we want that to be Hume's message. A recurrent topic in the literature has been locating Hume's voice in the voices of his characters. But some commentators have warned against that approach: It seems to me that the only difficulty in recognising Hume's own position comes from failing to appreciate the Dialogues themselves. It is only because we approach them with concepts that they themselves 'deconstruct...