I need to begin by confessing that I am not anywhere near knowledgeable about Hume. I am trying to think through many of his arguments, but I might interpret them wrong because I have a poor knowledge of his corpus of philosophical writings. However, you have to start somewhere! So, despite my lack of expertise, I will try to understand what Hume is saying. Please do not mistake my views on Hume as the view one must have. Anyway, on to the discussion of the essay:
Hume begins the essay by stating that it is difficult to prove the immortality of the soul. For reasons that will become apparent later, I believe he is referring to what some would call each person’s soul, i.e. the part of a person that most people think will be in the afterlife. The reason I want to establish this now is that later he refers to soul and I believe he is referring to soul-stuff, the substance (I hate to use that word) of each person’s soul. We shall see later that to understand Hume’s arguments in a few places, we have to distinguish between individual souls and soul-stuff. He refers to both as “soul”.
Hume claims that there are three common types of arguments for the immortality of the soul: (1) metaphysical themes, (2) moral ones, or (3) physical ones. According to Jonathan Bennett, the editor of the version of this essay I am using, Hume uses physical to mean something like “pertaining to how things stand in the real world”. It does not simply mean matter. I will begin with the metaphysical themes. I will probably write several posts on each theme, so it might be a week or so before I get to the moral arguments.
Metaphysical Themes
Hume begins by addressing the difference in substance between body and mind. Some people hold that the soul is a difference substance than matter is. There is physical stuff, and then there is spiritual stuff. Thought, the argument goes, cannot take place in a material substance, like the body, but has to take place in something immaterial, e.g., the soul. Hume devotes very little time to this argument, but I imagine the reason he is addressing is that in order to secure the immortality of the self, one has to show that the self is different than our bodies, which we all know decays. If I am not something other than my body, which will eventually turn to dust, then I will eventually not exist. The claim that what is essentially me—the part of me that will be present in the afterlife—is a different substance from my physical body is essential to showing that I am immortal. (At least, some people would claim this. I am not denying that one can deny Cartesian dualism and still believe in some kind of afterlife. I am simply presenting the barebones of the argument Hume is trying to refute.)
Hume attacks this notion of different substances by attacking what they have in common: the idea of substance. We try to distinguish between the soul and the body by saying they are different substances, but Hume claims we have no idea what substance is. He says, “…we are taught by sound metaphysics that the notion of substance is wholly confused and imperfect, and that our only idea of any substance is a collection of particular qualities inhering in an unknown something.” Hume doesn’t elaborate on this, so I am not sure exactly what he is trying to say. He might be saying something like this: we never get at this mysterious thing called substance. What we come in contact with is the qualities of something. For example, we come in contact with the qualities of a table, e.g. its brownness, its hardness, etc. When you subtract the different qualities away from the table, what are you left with? Substance? We don’t know. So, we do not know what substances are.
yet, do we even know what qualities matter has? What quality does matter have in all of its instances? Take the quality hardness as an example: all matter does not have hardness, because water is made of matter but it is not hard. The trouble is that our known qualities are used to distinguish between things that are made of matter. If this is so, then we do not have known qualities that are present in every manifestation of matter, because if the quality was present in every manifestation of matter than we cannot use that quality to distinguish a manifestation of matter from other manifestations of matter. Think about how we use qualities: we use qualities to describe an object, to pick an object out of all the other objects. A quality is not useful unless it can distinguish between some class of objects and other class of objects.
So, we do not know of any quality that is common in all matter. Therefore, if we do not know what substance is, and we do not know what qualities matter has (much less what spirit-stuff has), then how can we be sure that there is as much of a distinction between the physical matter and spiritual-stuff. Therefore, we cannot use their distinction to argue that the mind (or soul) survives death.
However, Hume’s main argument against the immortality of the soul comes next. I will address it in the following post. (I also might rewrite portions of this post and post the revised version later, because I am unhappy about some of it. I just thought I would publish this and see what feedback I got.
