Self and Intersubjectivity

This chapter argues that Ciceronian, ‘Academic’ scepticism provides a model for Hume’s attempts to harmonise rationality and sentiment. It enables Hume to engage in the language game of reader participation through which essayists such as Addison and Steele had already begun to model a sociable public sphere. Hume’s conversion from ‘difficult’ to ‘easy’ empiricism is connected to a broader tension within Enlightenment thought between the value systems associated respectively with modern Newtonian science and classical ideas of virtue and eudemonia. While Hume bases judgement upon feelings rooted in custom and habit, common-sense thinkers such as Thomas Reid ground it in a form of intuition that is philosophically foundational. Cutting across this difference, however, is a shared belief that society underpins rationality. In Hume’s ‘intercourse of sentiments’, Reid’s ‘prescience’ and Stewart’s notion of the ‘stamina’ of intellect, sociability, conversation, association, and correspondence become the natural and social conditions of meaningful thought.

Romantic Essayism

This chapter argues that the Romantic familiar essay privatizes and idealizes the essay’s inherent epistemological ambiguity. While for Addison, Hume, and Johnson, the essayist moderates communication at the borderline of systematic science and the public sphere, for Hazlitt and his contemporary Charles Lamb, the ‘public’ could no longer function as the ground for epistemic solidarity. Once the social intellect of the Scottish Enlightenment was moved into the private domain of consciousness and individual imagination, the essayist was increasingly seen as mediating between idealized phenomenological realms of ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ experience. Consequently, the ludic indeterminacy of the Romantic imagination is oriented by a purely aesthetic purposiveness: its playfulness expresses not the pragmatic presuppositions of communication, but the dark foundations of experience. In aestheticizing the communicative intellect of the eighteenth-century essayists, the identity doublings and performances of the Romantic familiar essay acquire significance as the hypostatized others of a lost wholeness.

The Conversable Intellect

Hume’s rhetorical concerns underscore the ways in which the pragmatic turn in British counter-Enlightenment thought is also, in a broad sense, a linguistic turn. His understanding of the necessity of trust in sustaining the fictions of belief necessary for communication undermines the conception of meaning as representation in ways that enable thinkers like Reid and Bentham to model human thought around the pragmatics of communication. Nonetheless, Hume’s linking of truth and the social conventions of language divides common-sense thinkers like Reid and Stewart (who interpret such indispensable conventions as first principles) from materialists such as Bentham and John Horne Tooke (who see Hume’s fictions of belief as, at best, pragmatically necessary). What unites Hume, Tooke, and Bentham is their vision of language as the source of what Bentham calls ‘logical fictions’, fictions that are at once philosophically unjustifiable and necessary for coherent thought.

Conclusion

What, if anything, does the fate of the essay in its ‘Golden Age’ tell us about the condition of the genre today? There is little doubt that interest in the essay is flourishing in the twenty-first century.1 Two factors have contributed to this resurgence. The first is the genre’s traditional status as ‘secondary’ form of literature. This meant that, while for a long time the essay was confined to the footnotes of literary history, it attracted the attention of approaches concerned with identifying marginal forms of writing, a tendency that can be traced from Adorno’s landmark essay, the ‘Essay as Form’, to the postmodern essayism of Barthes and Derrida....

Essays in Experience

This chapter argues that the familiar essay becomes an important analogue for communicative reason through its connections with three crucial features of socialized empiricism: scepticism, dialogue, and philosophical thought as performance. The first of this trio of concerns stems from a connection between the activity of ‘essaying’ and philosophical doubt. The second emerges around the genre’s association with ideas of sociability and the activities of dialogue and conversation. Addison’s declared intention to bring philosophy and science out of the academies and into the coffee houses is radicalized by Hume’s endeavour to incorporate the language of sociability into the principles of philosophy itself. Consequently, in the familiar essay, Hume and Johnson find a generic trope for an active and engaged (rather than receptive and contemplative) empiricism, one which implies that the truth of any empirical statement ultimately depends upon the manner of its performance.

Introduction

The introductory chapter begins by offering a reading of Hume’s unsent 1734 letter to Dr Arbuthnot, which recalls how his youthful enthusiasm for philosophy became pathological, leading him into the ‘Disease of the Learned’. The letter marks the point at which Hume consciously abandons the foundational idea of philosophy as the science of knowledge in favour of a holistic and ‘easy’ philosophy based upon the ‘science of man’, which encompasses moral, sentimental, and aesthetic concerns. This new science conceives experience according to the model of experimental thought evident in Hume’s own writing, a model based on the ‘essayistic’, trial-and-error method of intersubjective communication. The chapter explores the consequences of this fundamentally pragmatic reorientation for later eighteenth-century thought. While providing a breakdown and description of subsequent chapters, the Introduction also draws attention to the importance of this reorientation of notions of trust, language, virtue, performance, and the essay genre itself.

The Subject of Trust

This chapter argues that trust and testimony acquire a significance in the work of Hume and his contemporaries that belies the relatively scant (and in Hume’s case, ambivalent) attention they devote to the subjects. Following Annette Baier, Steven Shapin, Martin Hollis, Guido Möllering, and John Hardwig, it suggests that trust, being fundamentally non-rational and social, is antithetical to the Cartesian picture of a lucid, private rationality. By enshrining trust as epistemologically constitutive, the Humean picture of communicative intelligence emerges as identifiably anti-Jacobin, the antitype of Rousseau’s picture of civic virtue as based upon transparency, perfect sympathy, and reason. The chapter proceeds to explore the ways in which the conflict between instrumental reason and trust that continues to exercise philosophers and economists today has its roots in the work of Hume, Reid, Smith, and other thinkers from this period.