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Hume's Dialogues
to end throughout all nature resembles exactly, though it much exceeds,
the productions of human contrivance, of human design, thought, wisdom, and intelligence. Since therefore the effects resemble each other, we
are led to infer, by all the rules of analogy, that the causes also resemble,
and that the Author of Nature is somewhat similar to the mind of man....
By this argument a posteriori, and by this argument alone, do we prove at
once the existence of a Deity and his similarity to human mind and intelligence" (p. 143).
It is much more problematic to determine Philo's position. In the first
eleven dialogues he voices skeptical views opposed to Cleanthes' argument from design. However, at the beginning of the twelfth and last dialogue he says he is actually in agreement with Cleanthes and gives his
assent with great enthusiasm to the argument from design. By the end of
the twelfth dialogue, however, he has changed again and concludes that
we can deduce from the universe only the most dubious and nebulous theism, which only makes more pronounced our need, not for philosophical
reasoning, but for revelation: "A person, seasoned with a just sense of the
imperfections of natural reason, will fly to revealed truth with the greatest
avidity" (p. 227). At this point in our discussion, suffice it to say that Philo
either is, or pretends to be, a philosophical skeptic, and at least in the first
eleven dialogues all the rhetorical cleverness he can muster is directed
against Cleanthes' use of the argument from design: "Is the world, considered in general and as it appears to us in this life, different from what a
man or such a limited being would, beforehand, expect from a very powerful, wise, and benevolent Deity? It must be strange prejudice to assert
the contrary. And from thence I conclude that, however consistent the
world may be, allowing certain suppositions and conjectures, with the idea
of such a Deity, it can never afford us an inference concerning his existence" (p. 205).
The battle lines seem to be fairly clearly drawn. Hume is either supporting the positive and theistic arguments of Cleanthes or the much more negative and skeptical arguments of Philo. Since The Dialogues are Hume's last
word on religion, they have always been thought to provide the secret as to
what Hume himself really believed, and this is why for the last two hundred
years the question has been asked over and over again, but always with
urgency: which views did Hume himself really hold, Cleanthes' positive and
theistic beliefs or Philo's negative and skeptical ones?7
A first reading of The Dialogues all but forces us to agree with Hendel
7James Noxon, e.g., in his essay "Hume's Agnosticism" (in Hume, ed. V. C. Chappell [Notre
Dame, Ind.: Notre Dame University Press, 1968], p. 363), writes that, unless the question of who
speaks for Hume can be answered, "Hume's last philosophical testament provides us with no clue
to his own religious convictions."
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Hume's Dialogues
sounds like Hume, he too invokes the fourth reason. "The last words of
the book," says he, "do not permit any doubt" that Cleanthes is actually
Hume.'0 Similarly, Bruce McEwen refers to Pamphilus's endorsement of
Cleanthes as Hume's "last utterance in speculation" concerning religion."
The conclusion of Charles Hendel and, following Hendel, Rudolf Metz
and most recently Jeffrey Wieand, that it is Cleanthes who primarily
speaks for Hume, depends to a very great extent on Pamphilus's endorsement of Cleanthes at the end of The Dialogues.
It is, in fact, Jeffrey Wieand who presents most clearly the hermeneutical presuppositions on which the "Cleanthes is Hume" interpretation
must depend. In his article entitled "Pamphilus in Hume's Dialogues,"
Wieand discusses the deadlock over the question of which character
expresses the views of Hume, and he presents two hermeneutical options
employed to resolve the deadlock. We may be able to solve the problem by
consulting Hume's other writings on religion, or Hume's letters, or the
works Hume might have consulted in constructing The Dialogues. Thus,
the key to the correct interpretation of The Dialogues may lie in the
intertextual relation between The Dialogues and other texts. This
hermeneutical option is employed quite often by the "Cleanthes is Hume"
proponents. In fact, they nearly always appeal both to Hume's Natural
History of Religion, in which he states that no reasonable person can doubt
"the primary principles of genuine religion," and to a letter Hume wrote
in 1751 to his very good friend Gilbert Elliot, declaring, "You wou'd perceive by the sample I have given you, that I make Cleanthes the hero of
the dialogue."''2The second hermeneutical option Wieand outlines entails
that the real clue to understanding TheDialogues is entirely within the text
itself. Wieand recommends this hermeneutical option when he dismisses
other texts by saying that, if we "return to the text," it will become apparent that "the text supports the view advocated by Charles Hendel."'3
Wieand then argues for Hendel's reading by employing some of the four
obvious textual reasons we have already advanced.
Whatever else might be said about The Dialogues, it must be said that
Wieand's statement is absolutely correct: the text does support the view
that Cleanthes' views are superior to Philo's in that they are "nearer to the
truth." This is, after all, exactly what the text says. It also says that
Cleanthes exhibits an "accurate philosophical turn" and that Philo retracts
all his arguments against his good and learned friend, Cleanthes. This is
Gabriel Campayre, La Philosophie de David Hume (Paris: Ernest Thorin,
1'0 Quoted
12
1873), p. 324.
David Hume, The Natural History of Religion, ed. H. E. Root (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Uni-
versity Press, 1957), p. 12; John Hill Burton, Life and Correspondence
of David Hume(New York:
Garland, 1983), 1:331.
's Wieand,
p. 34.
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Hume's Dialogues
but that is precisely what does not occur. That is why in reading The Dialogues we have the feeling that something strange is going on here, that we
are being played with. We have that unusual experience of having the text
build up expectations only to confound them, which Gadamer so aptly
describes as the experience of "being brought up short by the text."'5
Since Philo's cavils often go unanswered by Cleanthes, we are led to ask
whether Philo is really sincere when he says he is only jesting in arguing
against Cleanthes. Might this be one place where Hume is being ironic?
And how can we take Pamphilus's endorsement of Cleanthes seriously as a
reflection of Hume's true views, and can Cleanthes truly be the hero of
The Dialogues since it is Philo who dominates the discussion and always
gets the better of the argument? AsJohn Nelson puts it, "how can the loser
in every match be in truth the hero of a tournament?"'6 Might this not be
another instance of Hume's irony? Even Wieand recognizes this is a possibility when he admits that "clearly, there is some irony in The Dialogues.
The question is where and how much.""7
The moment Wieand admits that there is some irony in The Dialogues,
he immerses himself in a dilemma from which the hermeneutical strategy
he recommends is by no means equipped to extricate him. How can we
both take seriously the possibility of irony in the text and also return with
Wieand to the text and put our trust in the interpretation that the text
supports? If we concede to Wieand that the key to the correct interpretation of The Dialogues is within the text, then what else can we do but listen
to the text closely and hope that it is being straight with us? If our reading
of The Dialogues is purely textual, then on what grounds can we evaluate
just where and exactly how much irony is in The Dialogues? A straight or
purely textual reading must proceed from the confidence that, even
though the text may be ironic, it is not so ironic that it is untrustworthy.
A straight reading proceeds from the confidence that the true meaning
of the text is still discernible within the text itself. But it is precisely this
confidence that our feeling of being played with, of being brought up
short by the text, robs from us. Without this confidence, we cannot be
nearly so sanguine as is Wieand about returning to the text, doing a
purely textual reading, and trusting the results of that reading. After all,
how much confidence can we have in a straight reading of what we suspect is a crooked text?
The other possible way of interpreting The Dialogues that Wieand
points out, that is, by consulting Hume's other works on religion and his
'5 Gadamer, p. 237.
'6John Nelson, "The Role of Part XII in Hume's Dialogues,"HumeStudies, 14, no. 2 (November 1988): 361.
17 Wieand (n. 5 above), p. 37, n. 8.
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Hume's Dialogues
If we look into the historical situation in which The Dialogues were written, however, it is evident that they are not at all exactly like any other
text. The fact that they are a posthumously published work, even though
Hume completed them fifteen years before his death, is indicative of the
many ways in which The Dialogues are different and unusual. A text substantially completed by 1761 at the latest but withheld from publication
until 1779, three years after Hume's death, because it wasjudged too subversive to appear during the author's lifetime, is decidedly not like every
other text. A fact always to keep in mind when interpreting The Dialogues
is that, even though there is no agreement about which character speaks
for Hume, still they were considered so threatening to the society in which
they were written that Hume never dared to publish them in his lifetime.
The facts surrounding the composition and the long-delayed publication of The Dialogues are well known, thanks largely to Kemp Smith, but
are rarely mentioned by those who argue that Cleanthes expresses
Hume's true views on religion. Hume completed a shorter version of The
Dialogues by 1751 and circulated it among his friends, every one of whom,
so far as we know, urged him to suppress it for fear of the abuse and perhaps even criminal prosecution it might bring on its author. Dr. Hugh
Blair, for instance, wrote from Paris in 1763 that, if Hume in his writings
had gone "one step farther" and openly declared his lack of religious
beliefs, the atheistic French philosopheswould have erected a statue in his
honor. Blair then shrewdly cautions: "If you showed them the MSS of certain Dialogues perhaps that honour may still be done you. But for God's
sake let that be a posthumous work, if ever it shall see the light: Tho' I
really think it had better not."19 That same year Hume complained in a
letter to Sir Gilbert Elliot: "Is it not hard and tyrannical in you, more hard
and tyrannical than any act of the Stuarts, not to allow me to publish my
Dialogues? Pray, do you not think a proper dedication may atone for what
is exceptionable in them?"20
Hume heeded his friends' advice and refrained from publishing The
Dialogues. He did not desire to offend those members of the moderate
clergy whom he considered friends, and he did not want to increase the
controversy his earlier writings on religion had already caused. "Scotland
is too narrow a place for me," he wrote to Adam Smith in 1759, "and it
mortifies me that I sometimes hurt my friends."21 He hints at the controversy his writings have caused in a letter to his publisher in 1762: "I am
19Raymond Klibanskyand Ernest C. Mossner, eds., NewLettersofDavid Hume(New York: Garland, 1983), 1:72-73, n. 4.
20 Burton,
1:146-47.
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Hume's Dialogues
among his friends in the 1750s, the General Assembly was debating
whether or not to censor his writings,26 and the fact that while Hume was
writing The Dialogues his friends among the moderate clergy were being
attacked for defending him,27 and if we note the quite unusual circumstances surrounding the publication of The Dialogues, we deem it quite
plausible that Hume may not only have wanted The Dialogues to look like
Cleanthes' views are triumphant, but that he even may have had to do
this. Kemp Smith has pointed out that attacks on belief in God and on
Christianity were not permitted by eighteenth-century British society.28
Thus, when historical considerations are taken into account, it seems
fairly certain that Philo's views must be defeated and that Cleanthes' views
must be judged "nearer to the truth" if The Dialogues are to remain dans le
vrai, as Foucault has it, within the boundaries of what a society permits to
be said and written.29 It may not, in fact, be too much to say that The Dialogues are in dialogue form, not because Hume liked the genre, but
because he had to use it. The dialogue form afforded him the best chance
at being permitted to say ironically what he wanted to say. And The Dialogues are ironic, not because of some inveterate but accidental trait of
Hume's character,30 but because they had to be. Since Hume could not
have said straightforwardly what he said ironically in The Dialogues, it
seems likely that he did not choose the irony as much as he had it forced
on him. Historical considerations suggest that the irony in The Dialogues
exists not for the literary reason of preserving the dramatic interest, but
for the practical and ultimately political reason that The Dialogues had to
be presented ironically if Hume were to have any chance of publishing
them without bringing on himself more calumny and perhaps even criminal prosecution.
As we have already said, the historical data concerning both Hume's life
and The Dialogues are well known. The fact is, however, that critics have
exhibited a curious reluctance and, at times, hostility toward believing
that Hume's historical situation might have influenced the manner in
26See Anand Chitnis, TheScottish
A SocialHistory(London: Croom Helm, 1976),
Enlightenment:
p. 57. When the General Assembly of 1755 did not censor him by name, Hume wrote to Allan
Ramsay:"Mydamnation is postponed for a twelvemonth. But next Assembly will surely be upon
me" (quoted in Richard Cher, Churchand Universityin theScottishEnlightenment[Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1985], p. 66).
27According to Cher, p. 67, "The primary targets of the infidelity campaign of 1755-1756
were not Hume and Kames but their best friends among the Presbyterianclergy-the Moderate
literati of Edinburgh."
28Kemp Smith (n. 3 above), p. 39.
29Michel Foucault, The Archaeologyof Knowledge(New York: Pantheon, 1972), p. 224.
3oSee John Price, TheIronicHume(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1956). In an otherwise
excellent work, Price explains the irony in TheDialoguesprimarily as a literary device and as an
aspect of Hume's character, at the expense of seeing how the irony was forced on Hume by the
societal constraints under which he wrote.
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Hume's Dialogues
placate his religious opponents, the onus is on him to explain then why
Hume opted not to publish TheDialogues when he finished them in 1761.
Nelson Pike provides another very interesting reason for not believing
that Hume would craft The Dialogues to make them more acceptable to
society. He says that this would amount to "intellectual subterfuge" and
that it is "a big step to accuse any author" of this.38If Hume's historical situation were such that the only way he could publish what he wished to
publish was to make Cleanthes, rather than Philo, look like the hero of The
Dialogues, it is hard to understand how this necessary action can be taken
as "intellectual subterfuge." If Hume did in fact make Cleanthes his hero
not because he really believed in that character's views but because he had
to to get The Dialogues published-which is at least possible considering
that even so he still never published them-this provides us with no
grounds for accusing Hume of anything. If anything, it bestows on us not
the right to accuse, but the responsibility in our interpreting to penetrate
beyond the mere textual meaning to the historical exigencies that burdened the author when he wrote. It bestows on us the responsibility to
take seriously the historical context of the text and to respond to the text
out of, as Gadamer has it, "the ethic of the historical consciousness, the
conscientiousness of the historical mind."39
Even those critics who believe that Hume did compose The Dialogues to
look like they support Cleanthes even though Philo actually voices
Hume's true views have shown an inability to take seriously the exigencies
of Hume's historical situation. James Orr, for instance, writes that Hume
often included in his writings certain pious passages that certainly did not
reflect his own beliefs. He did this, Orr thinks, not because he had to to
get his work published, but because he had a penchant for mocking Christianity, which Orr calls "reprehensible."40Greig says Hume made TheDialogues look less subversive because "he was desperately anxious to get the
book published." According to Greig, this amounted to "weakness" on
Hume's part.41 Even John Price, who notes that, when one is criticizing a
society's most cherished beliefs, "irony is frequently the best method of
keeping one's skin," still says quite naively: "Hume could have easily constructed an ending in which Philo's superiority was announced." Hume
made Cleanthes the hero of TheDialogues, Pricejudges, not out of a desire
to keep his skin but, rather, to exhibit "admirable artistic
economy.'"42
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Hume's Dialogues
the various literary theories that have since arisen to take its place have
accepted much more than they have challenged the notion that the meaning of a text is to be found, not in the relation between text and author,
but in the text itself. For example, the meaning of a text for Derrida and
the Yale deconstructionists is within the play of the signifiers, a fact that
has led Frank Lentricchia to label the deconstructionists "the newest generation of New Critics"46and has led Terry Eagleton to suggest that in a
sense "Anglo-American deconstruction is no more than the return of the
old New Critical formalism."47Similarly, even a discourse analyst such as
Paul Ricoeur declares his agreement with the view of a text as "a kind of
atemporal object, which has, so to speak, cut its ties from all historical
development."48 Understanding the meaning of a text, writes Ricoeur,
"has less than ever to do with the author and his situation."49
Perhaps not surprisingly, it is the harshest critic of contemporary literary theory's New Critical inheritance who reminds us of what our tendency to view authors as somehow transcendent to history and texts as cut
off from history causes us to forget. In his The World, the Text, and the
Critic, Edward Said declares: "nearly everyone producing literary or cultural studies makes no allowance for the truth that all intellectual work
occurs somewhere, at some time, on some previously mapped-out and
permissible terrain, which is ultimately contained by the state."50 It is precisely this truth that TheDialogues force us to confront. Wieand's call for a
return to the text reveals the inadequacy of a purely textual interpretation
and the need for a hermeneutical strategy that considers the text's historical context. The Dialogues force on the reader, not a return to the text, as
Wieand and so many others recommend, but a return to context, a return
to history, to that "previously mapped-out and permissible terrain, which
is ultimately contained by the state."
Frank Lentricchia argues that an antihistorical view of texts is
actually
tied to an idealistic conception of history that sees history, not as the scene
of disruption and change, but of continuity and sameness.5' One ramificathat for the New Critics "rescuingthe text from author and reader went hand in hand with disentangling it from any social or historical context. ... The poem must be plucked free of the wreckage of history and hoisted into a sublime space above it."
46Frank Lentricchia, Criticismand SocialChange(Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1983),
p. 39.
47Eagleton, p. 146.
48Paul Ricoeur, Interpretation
Theory:Discourseand theSurplusof Meaning(Fort Worth: Texas
Christian University Press, 1976), p. 91.
49Paul Ricoeur, "The Model of the Text: Meaningful Action Considered as a Text," Social
Research38, no. 3 (Fall 1971): 557-58.
50 EdwardSaid, TheWorld,theText,and theCritic(Cambridge, Mass.:Harvard
University Press,
1983), p. 169.
51See Lentricchia's After the New Criticism,pp. 109 ff.
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Hume's Dialogues
our obligations to others than Emmanuel Levinas. He, too, has been concerned with the ethical aspect of interpretation. For Levinas, the primary
task of interpretation is, not to echo the meaning of the text, but to link
the text to the real history of the person who created it.55 Only by doing
this, says Levinas, can we hope to discover that in the process of interpretation, not only is there within the words of the text a meaning to be discerned, but there is also an obligation to and responsibility for another
person, for the person who, across the miles and the years, first gave life to
the text.
Hume's Dialogues are particularly illuminative of this obligation and
this responsibility. By revealing the inadequacy of a purely textual interpretation, they return us to the text's context in place and time, to history.
They also reveal and return us to the ethical aspect of interpretation, to
what Gadamer calls the "ethic of the historical consciousness," which
springs, as Levinas always reminds us, from our ethical obligation to and
responsibility for the other person. For it is ultimately this obligation and
this responsibility that drives us beyond what the text merely says in order
to come to the most plausible interpretation as to what Hume himself
really thought regarding the religious question, so as to fulfill our obligation to him and to render a just interpretation of his (and our) text.
55See Emmanuel Levinas's 1948 essay, "Realityand Its Shadow" in his CollectedPhilosophical
Papers, trans. A. Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987).
605