Reply to My Critics

Reply to My Critics Jacqueline A. Taylor (bio) I I thank Genevieve Lloyd for her generous and thought-provoking comments and questions. She raises two distinct issues: one regarding how to think about the way in which Hume's account of pride might be innovative, and the other about how a genre of philosophical writing limits or opens up what and how an author might discuss the subject at hand. She sets both issues in the context of comparing Spinoza with Hume. Lloyd reminds us that A. O. Hirschman, in The Passions and the Interests, charts a conceptual shift between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, such that the change in political and economic conditions, heralding the rise of capitalism, led to the deposing of the traditional opposition between reason and passion in favor of their alliance in the form of rational interest. Is Hume effecting a similar conceptual shift with pride? This is an excellent question, and one I had not explicitly addressed in the book. In the Treatise account of pride, Hume purports to be critically examining the "nature, origin, causes, and effects" of the indirect passions" (T 2.1.1.3; SBN 276).1 In establishing the origin of pride by way of a double association of ideas and impressions, we see Hume at his most experimental, finding the general causes and effects that characterize every occurrence of pride. But, when he turns to the particular occasioning causes of pride, an account meant to provide evidence for the hypothesis regarding the double association, Hume presents general categories of causes, such as qualities of mind and of body, or wealth, that reflect the facts about what people take pride in, or are esteemed for, in the observation of "common life." Hume does here differ from Spinoza's more traditional (and in a sense Christianized) view of pride as an unjust estimation [End Page 179] of oneself, or a putting of oneself above others (including God). For Hume, people justly take pride in their talents or virtue, their beautiful or talented children, as well as their beautiful house. He had also described these causes as non-original insofar as what counts as, say, virtue or a fine house will track such things as custom or trends, technological innovation or deprivation, and in particular the way in which sympathetic communication and mirroring help to create and sustain the contours of shared values. I agree with Lloyd's point that Spinoza's distinction between the proud person's imagination-based inadequate idea of himself and someone whose rightful self-esteem is based on a true understanding of his capacities differs from the role that Hume assigns the imagination, especially with respect to the production of pride, and the sympathy-based shaping of pride's contours. As a naturalist, Hume takes an interest in what Lloyd terms sympathy's darker side, such as how sympathetic communication between those in a community with an extreme imbalance of power can enhance the pride of the powerful or the humility of the powerless. In his later work, especially the study in the Essays of moral causes, both fixed and accidental, we can reconstruct a broader and more in-depth account of the different kinds of institutional and less formal arrangements that can lead to greater or lesser sociability and society-wide flourishing. In the essay genre, and in the later moral philosophy of the Enquiry, Hume attends more fully to the social mores of common life, setting aside the detailed mental associationism of the Treatise in favor of locating the foundation of morals and the markers of social flourishing (knowledge, industry and humanity) in an observable human nature embedded in social contexts and linguistic conventions (for example, that of morality rather than self-interest, or of gallantry and politeness). II Willem Lemmens has been a friend and fellow Hume researcher for a number of years, and I have valued the opportunities to visit beautiful Antwerp to discuss sympathy and Hume, and to work with some of his graduate students. In his remarks, Lemmens denies that Hume has reformist or emancipatory aims that would impart a normative dimension to his moral philosophy. For example, Hume's discussion...

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