One of my best experiences as an undergraduate was a year-long philosophy seminar in which we did a close-reading of Hume’s work. So, in honor of Hume’s 300th anniversary I thought I’d read an article on Hume and anthropology. The article I picked was “What is the Western Concept of the Self? on Forgetting David Hume” by D. W. Murray.
Murray’s argument is fairly simple and straightforward – in a good way. In a way reminiscent of Hume’s own writing. Murray argues that anthropologists have constructed a “monolithic” vision of “Hegemonic Western Tradition,” which they then contrast with their own work. In particular, he is concerned with anthropological writing about the “Western” notion of a “transcendent self” against which the rest of the world’s cultures are judged.
To counter this, Murray looks at David Hume as an example of a very different Western notion of the self. Hume saw the idea of a “continuous self” as “fantastic.” For “there was nothing beneath the ideas to connect them…”
Hume’s theory of experience closely paralleled the atomistic theory of matter. Hume reduced all the contents of the mind to a number of elementary sensations. In thinking, what transpired was, in fact, a succession of detached sensations. “Ideas” were faint copies of “impressions,” or distinct perceptions. Beyond the impressions and ideas, it was unnecessary to look.
He goes so far as to suggest that there was something postmodern in Hume’s conception of identity, as the following quote from Hume illustrates:
Thus the controversy concerning identity is not merely a dispute of words. For when we attribute identity, in an improper sense, to variable or interrupted objects, our mistake is not confined to the expression, but is commonly attended with a fiction, either of something invariable and uninterrupted, or of something mysterious and inexplicable, or at least with a propensity to such fictions.
It wasn’t till Kant that the “Transcendental Ego” was established with “a stable, continuous, and transcendent self-identity, offered as a defense against Hume’s contingent vision.”
Returning to anthropology, he asks:
What needs to be explained is why (perhaps as a consequence of Enlightenment notions of “Progress,” but then what isn’t) so many academics feel the need to invert the process. That is, they seem to project a simplistically monolithic cultural and intellectual past onto what is in fact enormous diversity and competition.
He suggests that this is not simply a matter of ignorance, but suggests a broader pattern to establish a “mythic past” as an ideological basis for anthropological critique. A “select configuration of the West’s historical practices, defined partly in opposition to Western understanding of foreign ways and intrusions, as a function of the West’s own postcolonial status.” An interesting suggestion, and I can think of no better fitting tribute to David Hume than to critically examine our own institutional traditions of critique, and by contemplating the complexity and diversity of Western notions of the “self.”