James A. Harris > Quotes

“Pope showed that a writer, if he were sufficiently good, and had sufficient business acumen, did not need a patron or employer. This new model of authorship made some uncomfortable. Writing for money sounded mercenary and generally unrespectable. The old culture of aristocratic patronage might, in a way, have been a surer guarantee of literary integrity and independence.69 If Hume had any worries on this score, he never confessed them. The tone of ‘My Own Life’ was one of unabashed pride in his own financial success. Hume positively trumpeted the fact that the money he received from his booksellers ‘much exceeded any thing formerly known in England’, and that it made him not just independent but also opulent.70 Another role model may have been Voltaire, who, while not averse to the patronage of the great, was a very capable marketer of his own works. The young Hume would have”
― James A. Harris, Hume: An Intellectual Biography

“Hume declared that ‘Our connection with each other, as men of letters, is greater than our differences as adhering to different sects or systems’. ‘Let us’, he continued, ‘revive the happy times, when Atticus and Cassius the Epicureans, Cicero the Academic, and Brutus the Stoic, could, all of them, live in unreserved friendship together, and were insensible to all those distinctions, except so far as they furnished matter to discourse and conversation’.”
― James A. Harris, Hume: An Intellectual Biography

“It was not reason but rather custom that was, Hume claimed, ‘the guide of life’ (T 652).”
― James A. Harris, Hume: A Very Short Introduction

“Similarly, in A Philosophical Enquiry into Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, Burke depicted the investigation of the springs and the tracing of the courses of the passions as part of a larger search into ‘the general scheme of things’, in so far as the goal was to reduce the complex to ‘utmost simplicity’, and thus ‘communicate to the taste a sort of philosophical solidity’.”
― James A. Harris, Hume: An Intellectual Biography

“It may have been that early on Hume took his conception of the life of letters from the writings of Shaftesbury, and, perhaps, especially from Shaftesbury's ‘Advice to an Author’.”
― James A. Harris, Hume: An Intellectual Biography

“Many of Hume's early readers, including Smollett, believed that Hume wrote his History in imitation of Voltaire. Johnson claimed that ‘Hume would never have written History, had not Voltaire written it before him’.91 Hume, though, had none of Voltaire's reforming zeal, neither in religion nor in politics. Hume did not write, as Voltaire said he did, pour agir. It is impossible to imagine Hume taking up a case like that of Jean Calas, or writing a book like Voltaire's Traité sur la Tolérance.92 Hume seems to have been made uncomfortable by the utopian optimism and dogmatic self-assurance of the philosophes – which may have been part of the reason why he attempted to give assistance to their bitter critic, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He was even more sceptical than Rousseau himself was as to the possibility of a writer's doing anything to change and improve the world in which he lived. His account of human nature, with its subversion of the authority of reason, and its case for belief in general as being a function of feeling not rationality, cast doubt on the very possibility of enlightened reform and improvement. Politics as Hume describes it is”
― James A. Harris, Hume: An Intellectual Biography

“The 1742 essays ‘The Epicurean’, ‘The Stoic’, ‘The Platonist’, and ‘The Sceptic’, taken together, demanded to be read as, in effect, Hume's explanation of why he did not think of himself as able to continue with moral philosophy's traditional project of emotional therapy and improvement of character, and why, as moral philosopher, he concerned himself with the purely explanatory task of identifying the factors which determine moral judgement. Hume liked to portray himself an anatomist of the moral life – and as an anatomist also of politics. He made a much more serious attempt than was common at the time to rise above factionalism and to discuss politics with genuine impartiality, in the interests of understanding the deeper forces threatening the much-vaunted constitutional settlement of 1688. And in his writings on commerce, there were none of the usual pleas of books on trade for this or that piece of legislative reform, in the interests of this or that part of the mercantile or manufacturing community. The ‘chief business’ of both philosophers and politicians, Hume wrote in ‘Of Commerce’, was ‘to regard the”
― James A. Harris, Hume: An Intellectual Biography

“And in the process it goes some way towards explaining why highly stratified societies are not pulled apart by tensions arising from inequalities of wealth and social standing. Of course there is bound to be resentment and envy on the part of the poor and powerless when they compare their lives with the lives of their superiors. But, Hume suggested, this resentment usually produces not a desire to overturn the social order, but, instead, a desire on the part of the lower orders to improve their situation relative to those around them. For we care much more about how we stand in our relations with our peers than about the distance between us and the rich and famous.”
― James A. Harris, Hume: A Very Short Introduction

“He sought, and found, a very large readership among the educated men and women of his day, in Britain, and in Europe more widely. What he wanted from his readers, but did not always get, was a willingness to join him in a certain kind of discursive space, in a kind of conversation”
― James A. Harris, Hume: An Intellectual Biography

“Sympathy—not here a form of compassion, but rather a kind of attunement to the states of mind of other people—is absolutely central to the world of the passions as Hume describes it. It gives us the vivid, sometimes pleasurable, sometimes painful, sense we always have of ourselves as standing in relation with other people.”
― James A. Harris, Hume: A Very Short Introduction

“Hume was especially interested in how the relation of ownership, or property, insinuates itself into our emotional lives to the point where it is the principal cause of these ‘indirect’ passions.”
― James A. Harris, Hume: A Very Short Introduction

“[T]he minds of men are mirrors to one another’ (T 365), Hume remarked, and just as mirrors are not in control of the reflections they give, so also our feelings, and beliefs, cannot help but be impinged upon by the feelings and beliefs of those around us.”
― James A. Harris, Hume: A Very Short Introduction

“The first really significant event in Hume's intellectual life may have been an encounter with Shaftesbury's Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times. Hume bought, or was given, a copy in”
― James A. Harris, Hume: An Intellectual Biography

“Pride, shame, love, and hatred are classified by Hume as ‘indirect’ passions. They are different in kind from simple and immediate responses to present or future good and evil, like joy and sorrow, or hope and fear. Their indirectness lies in the fact that they are complex mental phenomena which arise from ideas of ourselves in our relations with a wide variety of causes of pleasure and pain.”
― James A. Harris, Hume: A Very Short Introduction

“Worries about the reliability of the understanding arose only when Hume realized that, properly speaking, we have no idea at all what we are talking about when we call one thing the cause of another. We come to believe that one thing is the cause of another when the two things in question have presented themselves in our experience in a particular way.”
― James A. Harris, Hume: A Very Short Introduction

“By twenty-six Hume had completed the first two volumes of A Treatise of Human Nature, ‘the masterpiece which contains all that is most important in his thought’. The Treatise, though, was ‘a complete failure’, and there followed years of poverty and insignificance. Hume”
― James A. Harris, Hume: An Intellectual Biography

“The philosopher did not have a practical agenda. That was implicit in his concern for the general, not the particular. This made philosophical politics look attractively different from the self-seeking squabbling of party political debate. On the other hand, it made philosophical religion look, to some at least, reprehensibly theoretical and ‘cold’.”
― James A. Harris, Hume: An Intellectual Biography

“It mattered then, that, having removed a controlling faculty of reason from human nature, Hume had an account to give of how the violent passions are tamed and suppressed.”
― James A. Harris, Hume: A Very Short Introduction

“The societies that human beings live in are so large and complex that peace and order require the invention of moral codes, and of government and political power too.”
― James A. Harris, Hume: A Very Short Introduction

“Sympathy combines with our interest in property to generate a form of love or esteem which Hume took to be particularly prevalent in human nature. This is the admiration we feel for the rich and powerful.”
― James A. Harris, Hume: A Very Short Introduction

“doctrine or a subject matter, but rather as a habit of mind, a style of thinking, and of writing, such as could in principle be applied to any subject whatsoever.”
― James A. Harris, Hume: An Intellectual Biography

“This suggests that there would be little plausibility to a suggestion to the effect that the remit of the philosophical man of letters, as understood by Hume, was to work towards the demise of the Christian religion.”
― James A. Harris, Hume: An Intellectual Biography