our temper, we may feel a desire of another’s happiness or good, which, by means of that affection, becomes our own good, and is afterwards pursued, from the combined motives of benevolence and self-enjoyment? (M (M App2.12-3, pp. 301-2)
Just like Butler, Hume makes clear that our pleasure in the important cases is a consequence of our desires being satisfied, and hence that those desires cannot themselves be hedonistic.
2.5. Desire in the Dissertation on the Passions
It would seem to be the standard view that, when writing the Dissertation on the Passions, Hume did nothing more than select a few passages from Book 2 of the Treatise, reorder them, and make some minor stylistic changes. My Difference Thesis, of course, claims that Hume’s revisions were much more substantial. It is true that only a very small proportion of the Dissertation contains entirely new material, and that many of the modifications to the old material are purely stylistic. But though they are small in number, the few additions and non-stylistic changes that Hume did make are enormous in implication. What Hume does with the Butler paragraph is an excellent case in point.
Let us start by looking again at the original Butler paragraph in the Treatise, together with some of its preceding context:
’Tis easy to observe, that the passions, both direct and indirect, are founded on pain and pleasure, and that in order to produce an affection of any kind, ’tis only requisite to present some good or evil. ...
When good is certain or probable, it produces Joy. When evil is in the same situation there arises Grief or Sorrow.
When either good or evil is uncertain, it gives rise to Fear or Hope, according to the degrees of uncertainty on the one side or the other.
Desire arises from good consider’d simply, and Aversion is deriv’d from evil. The Will exerts itself, when either the good or the absence of the evil may be attain’d by any action of the mind or body.
52 CHAPTER 2. MOTIVATION
Beside good and evil, or in other words, pain and pleasure, the di- rect passions frequently arise from a natural impulse or instinct, which is perfectly unaccountable. Of this kind is the desire of punishment to our enemies, and of happiness to our friends; hunger, lust, and a few other bod- ily appetites. These passions, properly speaking, produce good and evil, and proceed not from them, like the other affections. (T 2.3.9.1, 2.3.9.5-8, p. 438-9)
Recall, in particular, that “good” and “evil” are used in the Treatise simply as synonyms for “pleasure” and “pain”, and thus that the penultimate paragraph just quoted constitutes a clear endorsement of hedonism; an account which is then promptly contradicted by the Butler paragraph.
With this in mind, let us now take a look at what happened to these para- graphs when Hume came to rewrite them in the Dissertation on the Passions:
Some objects produce immediately an agreeable sensation, by the original structure of our organs, and are thence denominated Good; as others, from their immediate disagreeable sensation, acquire the appellation of Evil. Thus moderate warmth is agreeable and good; excessive heat painful and evil.
Some objects again, by being naturally conformable or contrary to pas- sion, excite an agreeable or painful sensation; and are thence called Good or Evil. The punishment of an adversary, by gratifying revenge, is good; the sickness of a companion, by affecting friendship, is evil.
When good is certain or probable, it produces Joy. When evil is in the same situation, there arises Grief or Sorrow.
When either good or evil is uncertain, it gives rise to Fear or Hope, according to the degrees of uncertainty on the one side or the other.
Desire arises from good considered simply, and Aversion is derived from evil. The Will exerts itself, when either the good or the absence of the evil may be attained by any action of the mind or body. (P 1.1-2, 4-6, p. 3)
2.5. DESIRE IN THE DISSERTATION ON THE PASSIONS 53 To a careless eye, not much has changed. The last three paragraphs are word for word repeats (spot the extra comma), and the second paragraph is just an abridged or slightly modified version of the Butler paragraph, moved a little way up the page. But if we look again more closely, we can see that, with a very few carefully crafted alterations, Hume has effected a considerable change in meaning. The key is in the first of the paragraphs just quoted (which is, appropri- ately enough for my first argument in support of the Difference Thesis, the very first paragraph of the Dissertation on the Passions). Here Hume defines good and evil as pertaining to the objects that give rise to agreeable and disagree- able sensations: as the external causes of pleasure and pain, then, rather than as identical to these feelings. Similarly in the second paragraph (the amended version of Butler paragraph from the Treatise): objects are said to be good or evil, when they excite pleasure or pain (in virtue of gratifying or thwarting an object-directed desire). This seemingly small terminological difference has a con- siderably important consequence: the very same words that constituted, in the Treatise, an endorsement of hedonism, no longer carry that meaning. Desire is now said to arise from the consideration of objects, rather than the consideration of pleasure; and similarly the will is now said to exert itself when the object can be attained, rather than the pleasure. The author of the Dissertation, therefore, was not a hedonist. He was, as he had been ever since 1741, a clear and consistent supporter of Butler’s object-directed motivational psychology.
Analogous to this particular point about desire and aversion, there is a gen- eral point about the direct passions as a whole. At the start of the Treatise, we may recall, Hume defined the direct passions—“desire, aversion, grief, joy, hope, fear, despair and security” (T 2.1.1.4, p. 277)—as those that “arise immediately from good or evil, from pain or pleasure” (T 2.1.1.4, p. 276). Hume’s definition of these passions in the Dissertation is on the face of it much the same: he says that they “arise from a direct pursuit of good and aversion to evil” (P 2.1, p. 7). But again, since good and evil are no longer identical to pleasure and pain, but are instead applied to the objects that give rise to these feelings, the very same words now have a very different meaning. And Hume’s mature definition of the
54 CHAPTER 2. MOTIVATION direct passions, unlike his earlier one, is consistent with the inclusion of object- directed desires in this set. I have drawn this closely related conclusion here and now, for the sake of clarity, but I will draw it again in the next chapter—perhaps a little more carefully, and at any rate in the context of the relevant existing debate—when I turn to examine Hume’s classification of the passions.
As noted in the introduction, Selby-Bigge dismissed the Dissertation on the Passions long ago as containing nothing more than “verbatim extracts from Bk. II of the Treatise, with some trifling verbal alterations”.12 More recently, Terence Penelhum has expressed a similar sentiment, saying that the later work “is merely a brief r´esum´e of the arguments of Book II of the Treatise”.13 Though it is seldom said explicitly (the Dissertation is seldom mentioned at all), this is presumably the standard view. As the present example illustrates, it is certainly understand- able. But this hasty reaction has apparently discouraged commentators from looking more closely at the detail of what Hume says in the earlier and the later works. When we do this, we can see that the differences are in fact considerable. By altering just a few words, Hume changed sides on one of the major debates at the time, abandoning his hedonism in favour of Butler’s object-directed view. Or rather (as we saw in the previous two sections), the change of sides had already taken place. But the first four paragraphs of the Dissertation, when contrasted with their corresponding Treatise passages, provide a clear and independent cor- roboration of the developmental story that I have told, and a refutation of the view that there are no substantial differences between these two texts; and all this just on the first page of the later work. As we will see over the course of the thesis, this was by no means the only change that Hume made.
12Selby-Bigge (1893/1975, pp. xx-xxi). 13Penelhum (1975, p. 110).
Chapter 3
Hume’s Classification of the Passions
The aim of this chapter is to locate the passions within Hume’s general taxon- omy of the perceptions of the mind, and to introduce his distinctions among the passions themselves. It will emerge that Hume’s terminology and classificatory remarks are not exactly the same in the earlier and later works, and that many of these changes can be traced back to a greater awareness of Butler’s object- directed desires and of the need to make room for them. The present chapter is concerned only with Hume’s general remarks; when we turn to the particulars, in the next two chapters, yet more differences will emerge.