TODAY is the 300th birthday of David Hume, the most important philosopher ever to write in English, according to The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The conferences being held on Hume this year in Austria, the Czech Republic, Russia, Finland and Brazil suggest that the encyclopedia’s claim is perhaps too modest.
Panelists will cite Hume’s seismic impact on epistemology, political theory, economics, historiography, aesthetics and religion, as well as his deep skepticism of the powers of reason. But chances are they won’t have much to say about Hume the man.
It’s not surprising; Hume was most concerned with the nature of knowledge, morality, causality — not with fashioning a philosophy for everyday life. And yet his life, like his work, does offer insights about how to live. Consider an episode in Hume’s life that reflects his most provocative and misunderstood claim: that reason is and always will be the slave to our passions. Predictably, it happened in Paris.
In 1761, Hippolyte de Saujon, the estranged wife of the Comte de Boufflers and celebrated mistress of the Prince de Conti, sent a fan letter to Hume. His best-selling “History of England,” she wrote, “enlightens the soul and fills the heart with sentiments of humanity and benevolence.” It must have been written by “some celestial being, free from human passions.”
From Edinburgh, the rotund and flustered Hume, long resigned to a bachelor’s life, thanked Mme. de Boufflers. “I have rusted amid books and study,” he wrote, and “been little engaged ... in the pleasurable scenes of life.” But he would be pleased to meet her.
And so he did, two years later, when he was posted to the British Embassy in Paris. Boufflers and Hume quickly became intimate friends, visiting and writing to each other often. Hume soon confessed his attachment and his jealousy of Conti. Boufflers encouraged him, though no one knows how far: “Were I to add our deepened friendship to my other sources of happiness ... I cannot conceive how I could ever complain of my destiny.”
Yet she was also merciless. Men, she wrote to Hume, have “servile souls”; they “like to be mistreated; they are avid for severity, all the while indifferent to kindness.” Hume seemed different, but she warned him: “If I have been mistaken, my affection and all that supports it will soon be destroyed.”
While visiting Paris, Gilbert Elliot, a Scottish friend of Hume’s, became alarmed by Hume’s preoccupation with the comtesse and feared that his heart would be destroyed by her domineering character. After leaving, Elliot wrote to warn him: “I see you at present upon the very brink of a precipice ... the active powers of our mind are much too limited to be usefully employed in any pursuit more general than the service of that portion of mankind we call our country.”
In seeing his friend in danger of losing himself to passion, Elliot might have heard an echo of Hume’s own philosophical precepts. In his “Treatise of Human Nature,” Hume argued that “reason alone can never be a motive to any action of the will.” Desire, for example, “arises not from reason.” And yet it can (and ought to be) “directed by it.”
As Elliot foresaw, his friend’s bliss was soon shattered. The comtesse’s husband died; she was free to try to convince the Prince de Conti to marry her, and focused her formidable energy on doing so. A distressed Hume was transformed into her platonic adviser and confidant.
Yet he acquitted himself with dignity. When it became clear to everyone except Boufflers that the prince would not marry her, Hume urged her to be reasonable.
In effect, Hume did for her as Elliot had done for him. He reminded her that, insofar as it never causes or creates our desires, reason is indeed passion’s slave. But it is a most useful slave, for it helps us understand and guide our competing passions.
The “chief triumph of art and philosophy,” he wrote years before meeting Boufflers, is that it “refines the temper” and “points out to us those dispositions which we should endeavor to attain, by a constant bent of mind and by repeated habit.”
Those lines sound as if they came from a philosopher whose life reflects his convictions and intends to offer us a model for our own lives. Scholars of the urbane and portly Hume typically see him as an unlikely candidate to place alongside, say, Socrates as a philosopher of this “art of living.” So it’s worth remembering that Hume proved himself equal to his philosophy in his relationship with Boufflers.
He corresponded with her until the end of his life. In fact, he was on his own deathbed when news of the Prince de Conti’s death reached him. Yet he took up his pen to commiserate with the greatest love of his life.
And at the letter’s end he said goodbye: “I see death approach gradually without any anxiety or regret. I salute you, with great affection and regard, for the last time.”
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