Room for Doubt Read online

  Sense data are very important to Hume. In his philosophy, they are not disguises or illusions, as they are for Platonists, but the key to reality—or rather, they are reality itself. Hume understood that our access to things outside ourselves can only come by way of our individual perceptions, so that it would be erroneous, or at any rate simplistic, to draw a firm line between subjective and objective realities. When he first came up with this notion, it seemed frighteningly radical and skeptical, but Hume's insight eventually turned out to be as sound as science—indeed, to be science, as the twentieth-century work of Einstein and Heisenberg made clear.

  Though I have always lacked any shred of scientific temperament, and still do, Hume's way of viewing things has come to seem more and more useful to me the longer I live. As a young woman, I craved absolute distinctions. Everything, with me, got divided into two opposite extremes. I believed, for example, that there were two ways of writing: from the outside, for public purposes like academia and journalism, and from the inside, for letters, poetry, and other private communications. I wanted to put facts in one camp and opinions in another—which is not to say that I didn't lean toward the opinion camp myself (I did, most vociferously), but that I wanted facts to be somehow clean, undebatable, and separate from the mind that conceived them. And yet I longed, at the same time, for a brand of moral philosophy that would be eternal and absolute, that would have the force of “my” opinions and the solidity of “their” facts. (If you were to put this in Hume's terms, you might say that I longed for is to imply ought.) Now, though, as the rigidities of youth have loosed their hold a bit, I find that Hume's more nuanced take on the world satisfies my need for certainty. It is not that there are no truths. It is not that we cannot call some things wrong and others right. It is just that our ability to do so depends on a purely human, specific, temporary set of perceptions—temporary, I mean, in the sense that we are temporary.

  Maybe it was Hume's own weak-mindedness, his awareness of how unreliable our thought processes can be, that enabled him to come up with his philosophical… I was going to write “system,” but the word is misleading, because part of what he did, as a writer as well as a thinker, was to break down huge taken-for-granted systems of thought into their contradictory parts. He did this with religion, he did it with history, and he did it with psychology and philosophy, which for him were completely intertwined subjects. Whether he was talking about aesthetics or science, ethics or epistemology, he was interested in the extremely specific mechanisms whereby one absorbs information and formulates ideas. He would not have been so interested in the way the mechanism worked, I think, had he not also been aware of how it could cease to work. He did not, that is, take perception for granted. His own ability to believe what his senses transmitted to him contained within it, and was ultimately strengthened by, his capacity for doubt.

  David Hume was nothing if not sane, but he had an uncanny attraction to and for madness in others. I know people like this myself—attractive, extremely intelligent, often charismatic figures who give off some kind of aura that attracts lunatics. My friend Stephen, for instance, can barely take a medium-length trip without having the person in the seat next to him make some bizarre confession or issue some unreasonable demand; even those who look perfectly sane when they board the plane or train or bus seem compelled to reveal their innate nuttiness once they are seated next to Stephen. I do not mean to be New-Age-y about this. I am not saying that the lunatics can see Stephen's special aura. All I'm saying is that certain finely attuned sensibilities, particularly sensibilities that are themselves open to skepticism, doubt, and other fluid states, are more likely than others to engage the attention of the mad. David Hume seems to have been one of these people.

  There was, for instance, his experience working as a tutor to a markedly deranged young aristocrat. He took the job at a moment of financial and personal desperation, a few years after the unsuccessful publication of his Treatise (which in his view had fallen “dead-born from the Press”) and just after he had been turned down for the Edinburgh Moral Philosophy Chair; he took it, that is, because he had to. But I think he also took it because he thought it would be relatively undemanding work. How much tutoring, after all, could a mad person require? The young Marquess of Annandale was in fact sane enough to invite David Hume to come live with him, but it was made clear to the new tutor, even at that initial stage, that restorative quiet had been prescribed in response to the youthful nobleman's symptoms of mental instability. Annandale already had an ongoing minder, in the form of his faithful valet, as well as various other servants and medical attendants on tap. Knowing this, Hume must have assumed that he was merely charged with having some pleasant literary conversations during the lucid intervals, and would otherwise be left pretty much on his own in the great country house. Or perhaps he was not fully informed of Lord Annandale's mental condition beforehand, and imagined he was simply occupying the role of a gentleman's companion. What could “tutor” mean in the case of a veritable grown-up, a man nearly Hume's own age?

  What it meant, in the event, turned out to be a combination of babysitter, advocate, and desperate employee. Things started benignly enough: Annandale was a good fellow, despite his erratic behavior, and Hume grew quite fond of him. But then, as the weather and the household's finances declined, the young lord's condition worsened. At its depths, his illness sounded like psychosis of some kind, possibly schizophrenia; at less extreme moments it resembled manic-depression. (I am diagnosing after the fact, of course—Hume simply reported the symptoms.) Whatever else it included, Lord Annandale's condition definitely contained an element of paranoia.

  Unfortunately, the paranoia was to a certain extent justified—as when is it not?— by the treatment the young lord was receiving at the hands of his official guardians. There was a mother somewhere, but she was apparently in thrall to the evil demon controlling Annandale's purse strings: that is, one “Captain Vincent” (or possibly just plain Mr. Vincent—the military title may well have been an affectation), who had apparently been instrumental in hiring David Hume, no doubt figuring that this penniless writer would be the perfect patsy. But Hume was not one to accept injustice silently or passively. He fired off a seemingly endless round of letters—to the nakedly self-serving Mr. Vincent, to a distant relative of Annandale's named Sir James Johnstone, and even to Annandale's otherwise invisible mother—trying to get Vincent dethroned. Faced with an absolute lack of cooperation, Hume threatened to leave before the end of his promised term, though he hated to abandon the pathetic young lord (and he also needed to collect his salary, which had not been forthcoming as promised). Annandale apparently wanted to be left alone—so, at any rate, he told Hume—and Hume was grudgingly willing to leave him, but not until he did his best to right the wrongs of the situation. Meanwhile, though, he was inhabiting an increasingly gloomy mansion with an increasingly loony and unhappy pupil—until, at the end of a full year, he simply gave up and fled.

  You might think this was enough craziness to last Hume a lifetime, but the worst was still to come, for David Hume had yet to encounter Jean-Jacques Rousseau. That meeting between the great Scottish philosopher and the famous Swiss one took place in Paris in 1765, fully twenty years after the Annandale incident, by which time Hume had become the intimate of French aristocrats and the toast of French royalty, mainly on the basis of his multi-volume History of England. (There is a funny letter—Hume was a wonderful letter-writer, in that he knew how to make himself look both good and bad at the same time—in which he describes being praised by every member of the French royal family in turn, down to the toddling Prince, who “likewise advanced to me in order to make me his harangue, in which, though it was not very distinct, I heard him mumble the word histoire, and some other terms of panegyric.”)

  The first meeting between Hume and Rousseau was an occasion of profuse mutual flattery and sincere expressions of affection—sincere, at least, on Hume's part, and when did Rousseau ever under
stand himself well enough to be consciously insincere? In his usual generous manner, Hume had volunteered to help the impoverished, rebellious, persecuted hermit flee from France, where he was in danger of being arrested, and relocate safely in England. This alone turned out to be more of a task than Hume had reckoned on, since Rousseau insisted on bringing along his harridan of a mistress as well. And then, once he had been installed in a large house in the English countryside (a house borrowed from one of Hume's wealthier acquaintances), Rousseau began to turn against his benefactor. He declared that he was being mistreated, kept from his friends, deprived of all means of livelihood—and that the villain who perpetrated all these crimes against him was the dastardly David Hume.

  Hume, meanwhile, who had already spent some of his own limited earnings on keeping the Rousseau household afloat, had begun to petition the King of England for a royal pension to support the refugee philosopher. And here is the nub of the tale, the twist that makes it so Humean. He continued to pursue the pension for Rousseau, vigorously and ultimately successfully, even as Rousseau was badmouthing him to anyone who would listen. At the same time, he lost patience with the man and eventually sent an open letter to the French papers, declaring his own innocence and denouncing Rousseau's attacks on him. For this, Hume was roundly criticized: people felt he should not have stooped to the public forum in resolving this personal dispute. The excuse he gave was that he had been pushed to the limit, not only by Rousseau's ingratitude, but by his own fear that his reputation would suffer as a result of Rousseau's lies.

  But even at this point, in the midst of his anger and distress and shame, he went on trying to secure the royal pension. When it finally came through, Rousseau, who had repeatedly declared he would take no money that came to him through Hume's agency, nonetheless pocketed the money happily (or as happily as he ever did anything, which was not very). And Hume, though he never spoke to the ingrate again, kept for the rest of his life a pair of matching portraits that had been done of him and Rousseau by the Scottish painter Allan Ramsay; when he died, they were still hanging side by side on the wall of his Edinburgh flat.

  Or so I remember the story. I have not looked back at all the various biographies and letters to see if I recalled every detail correctly, and in any case how would it matter if I did not? After all, I am not writing about David Hume.

  He would have hated that cavalier tone about the facts. He was a historian as well as a philosopher, and even as a philosopher he was the kind who believed in details, in accuracy. (Isn't it odd how many of them do not? How, I always wonder, did they ever find their way into a line of work that advertises itself as searching for the truth?) Perhaps part of the reason I am avoiding writing about him is that I don't feel I can stand up to his scrupulous regard for the facts. As my historian friend Tom is always pointing out, facts have never been my strong point.

  This is not to say that I am a liar. On the contrary, I seem to be one of the more naturally truthful people I know: not out of any sense of virtue, but simply out of lack of imagination, or inability to make up a lie quickly enough, or bullheaded disregard for the feelings of others, or some other factor which would explain my failure even to come up with unimportant or tactful lies at opportune moments. When a stranger asks my name, for instance—I mean a stranger on a train, someone I will never see again—it doesn't occur to me to say “Priscilla” or “Allison” or “Julia” or “Ruth” or any of the legions of names more interesting than my own; “Wendy” just pops out of my mouth automatically, as if I didn't even have the wit to enjoy one moment of play-acting, one innocent chance to be someone other than my usual self. (An individual's personality is just a bundle of perceptions held together by habit, Hume argued, but mine seems to be even more habitual than most.) And if I can't be relied upon to produce a meaningless lie, imagine how much less effective I am at producing a lie that would serve a purpose—that would end an argument, say (“Oh, yes, now I agree with what you're saying”), or just make someone feel good (“That was a lovely poem”). The best I can do under such circumstances is to be silent, and since I have the worst poker face in the world, my silences tend to be all too audible.

  I suspect that this lack of inherent kindness is what draws me to kindness in others, not only in David Hume but also in my friend Tom—who, now I come to think of it, bears a resemblance to Hume in other ways as well. He too is given to charitable acts; he too began to write history only after first studying philosophy; he too does not believe in God, and deeply resents the pernicious influence of religion on our daily lives. They even look a bit alike, Tom and Hume, or so it seems to me as I examine the famous frontal portrait of David Hume, the one in which he is wearing a white wig and a gold-braided red coat. Tom's face is not as heavy as Hume's—you would never call him portly—but he has the same largeness of countenance, the same thick lower lip, the same calm, light eyes, the same broad, somewhat bumpy forehead, and even, perhaps, the same distinctive nose, neither hooked nor pointed but prominent nonetheless. There is no explaining the physical similarity, for Tom's ancestors are all German Jews, with not a Scot among them. Strangely, Tom is forever mistaking me for half-Scottish, and I have to keep reminding him that my red hair is Russian Jewish, and as for my mother's Scottish-sounding name, that came from a second husband who appeared and disappeared during my teens and has never been heard from since. But Tom forgets this every time, perhaps because the one thing he can easily remember about me, the one thing that ties me to his own fact-filled field of endeavor, is that I long ago spent a summer researching Patrick Geddes in the libraries of Edinburgh.

  I suppose I was better at facts in those days. It is not that I disbelieve in them now. I am deeply in favor of other people getting their facts right. I resent it when anyone, whether politician or journalist or literary theorist, tries to suggest that the borderline between truth and untruth is irrelevant. However blurred it may be, it is always relevant, and the effort to find out exactly where that line is at any given moment is what fuels most of the endeavors I care about. This is the case even with fictional and nonrepresentational artworks: they too need to be true to something. I cannot say exactly how beauty and truth are related, but I know that I believe they are— not in an unchanging way, as Keats seemed to think, but in a way that fluctuates (for me, at any rate) with every year that passes. But to say that truth is changeable does not make it any the less important, or meaningful. Only the pious believe in World Without End; for the rest of us, transitoriness is all we have. This is why Hume's philosophy, which is built up by increments through a series of moment-to-moment observations, is so appropriate to an unbeliever. Something is in the details, but it is not God.

  I am good at details, by the way; it is just large quantities of undigested facts that get me down. This is why I have trouble reading history (even Hume's charmingly written History of England volumes, which I have to put down after a page or two, or my head will begin to feel stuffed), but no trouble at all making a list of everything I need to do for the next day, or week, or month. I run my work-life the way Hume developed his philosophical theories: by imagining myself going through each step in a process, working my way forward along a chain of posited events until I reach a sticking-point, and then working my way back until I find the solution that will free up that stickiness. I did not learn to do this from David Hume, just as I did not learn from my father (or from my best friend, Arthur, who also does it) to add a tip to a restaurant bill that will make the credit-card total come out a round number. We all arrive at our obsessions independently.

  Having to get all the details straightened out in advance makes me rather difficult for other people to work with, or even play with. On recreational outings with friends, I am almost always the master planner. I call the box office to buy the necessary tickets well in advance; I calculate backward from the performance time to schedule the departure from home; I make the restaurant reservation at the precise time the show ends, plus ten minutes for transi
t. On family trips, I generally deal with all travel arrangements, all hotel or apartment accommodations, all dinner plans, all social activities. Occasionally I can cede this kind of responsibility to my friend Arthur (perhaps that is one of the reasons I find it so restful to be with him), but these opportunities to relax my guard do not come often. Mainly, I stay constantly alert to all possible disasters, all potential deviations from the worked-out plan.

  My friends and family put up with my managing ways, but as their price for accepting my reign, they insist on poking fun at my excessively linear personality. “I come to you with existential problems, and you offer me hobbies,” my old friend Katharine said to me when we were young. She said this in the nicest possible way— that is, truthfully, and affectionately, and with a sardonic acknowledgment that simpleminded practicality or blinkered obtuseness was sometimes just what the situation called for.

  My friend Thom Gunn was also a planner of an obsessive sort. It made me feel better that there was someone like him in the world, for Thom was a wild man as well as a planner—a reckless risk-taker with a huge gusto for life, as well as an obsessive detail-mongerer who carefully kept chaos at bay—and the fact that someone could combine these two sides made me think there might be hope for me yet. Thom wore his wildness on the outside and kept his planning pretty well hidden, so that only those of us who knew him over time could detect just how strong a tendency it was. I remember he once said to me, “I love the idea of being spontaneous, but I just can't manage to do it, so I figure out ways around it, like writing in my pocket diary a week ahead of time, ‘Remember to spontaneously ask Mike out to the movies tonight.’ ”