David Hume: Judge him, not me. Please, I’m too young to be cancelled

Also, we’re going bottom about breast this week, putting David Hume’s work before his life. As you’re all familiar with the tenets of his philosophy, I won’t go into it in great detail. Or at all really.

Suffice to say, Hume was a Scottish Enlightenment philosopher, associated with humanism, scepticism, naturalism, metaphysics and obesity.

He saw philosophy as the science of human nature, believing knowledge derives solely from experience. This makes him – all together now – “an empiricist!” Correct.

Come to think of it, Hume also thought passions rather than reason govern human behaviour. “Reason,” he said, “is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions.” Controversial.

Hume’s Law, or the is–ought problem, denies the possibility of logically deriving what ought to be from what is. I’ll just read that back. Righty-oh. Hope that’s all clear. Now to the life.

Hume was born in Edinburgh's Lawnmarket, near the Castle, in April 1711. His name was actually Home, but he later changed it as it was unusual in his beloved England and was pronounced Hume anyway. Laddie had to turn everything into a problem.

He was the second of two sons to Joseph Hume, an advocate and laird of Ninewells, a small estate near Chirnside, Berwickshire. His mother Catherine was the daughter of Sir David Falconer of Newton, president of the Scottish court of session.

Fathers figure in genius

As so often happens with men of genius, his father died when David was young – just two – and his mother raised the two brothers and their sister on her own.

In those days, you could basically walk into Embra Yoonie from infancy, though David waited till maturity, matriculating at around 11. He studied Latin and Greek, but also read widely in history, literature, and philosophy, as well as dabbling in maths and science. Sounds like he wasn’t bullied enough.

Certainly, he wouldn’t be bullied by his family into studying law which, like all decent taxpayers, he found “nauseous”. He never graduated but spent subsequent years immersed in reading and writing, which rightly caused him to have a nervous breakdown. Scurvy spots broke out on his fingers, which his physician diagnosed as “Disease of the Learned”. Crazy times.

He was prescribed “anti-hysteric pills” washed down with a pint of claret. Happy days. He also started eating better, with a particular fondness for port and cheese. And so began the journey to corpulence.

Despite minor noble ancestry, by 25 Hume had neither income nor profession. And so he went to Bristol. After a spell as a merchant’s assistant there, he moved to France, where the living was cheaper, settling in the sleepy village of La Flèche, in Anjou, and engaging in banter with the local Jesuits.

We note here that his alleged “atheism” (he was certainly a sceptic and critic but not the most diehard denier) stymied attempts at a university or literary career, though eventually he got a joab in Edinburgh as a librarian, which paid little or no money but at least meant he didn’t have to buy books.

Natural born oddity

Hume toiled for four years on his first major work, A Treatise of Human Nature, completing it in 1738 at age 28. Although considered today one of the most important books in Western philosophy, contemporary critics described it as “abstract and unintelligible”. Phew. Not just me then.

In 1745, during the Jacobite risings, Hume spent the time near St Albans, tutoring the Marquess of Annandale, who turned out to be bonkers, so he started his six-volume History of England, which took 15 years and ran to over a million words, despite which it became a bestseller. Strange times.

In 1746, Hume served as secretary to his cousin, Lieutenant General James St Clair, envoy to the courts of Turin and Vienna. He also started another tome, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Ken? However, after sitting on his butt for years, he became, in the words of biographer Ernest Mossner, “a man of tremendous bulk”.

Soon, his purse started filling out too. Publication between 1754 and 1762 of the aforementioned History of Englandshire brought him much sought fame (his “ruling passion”) and, from 1763 to 1765, life livened up when he became secretary to the British embassy in yonder Paris. Despite his inelegant girth, the salons (n.b. not hair) threw their doors open for him to squeeze through. Popular with the ladies (he never married), he was also frequently out on the epistemology.

Eventually, though, he wrote of Parisian life: “I really wish often for the plain roughness of The Poker Club of Edinburgh … to correct and qualify so much lusciousness.”

A poster hangs from the statue of the 18th Century philosopher David Hume on the Royal Mile, Edinburgh, following the Black Lives Matter protest rally on June 7, 2020, in Holyrood Park

Lording it up

Right, here’s the bit I didn’t see coming. Returning to Britain in 1766, Hume encouraged his patron Lord Hertford to invest in slave plantations in the Windward Islands, facilitating purchase of one such by writing to the French governor of Martinique on behalf of a wine merchant pal.

According to one academic, Hume’s “views served to reinforce the institution of racialised slavery in the later 18th century”. Not good.

So we should probably just move on to his death now, which occurred from intestinal cancer at what is now St David Street, on the northern fringe of Edinburgh’s swanky New Town, on 25 August 1776.

Top economist Adam Smith later recalled Hume fantasising about asking Charon, Hades’ ferryman, to allow him a few more years to witness “the downfall of some of the prevailing systems of superstition”. He envisioned Charon replying: "You loitering rogue! Get into the boat this instant!”

David Hume’s tomb stands in the Old Calton Cemetery, and his statue beside a pedestrian crossing on the Royal Mile.

In September 2020, Embra Yoonie’s horrendously ugly David Hume Tower was imaginatively renamed 40 George Square, after a student campaign objecting to the philosopher’s offensive epithets and writings related to race.