David Hume was an English philosopher and historian whose work was revolutionary on all of Western philosophy, highly influential on Kant and therefore the tradition that followed him, and has remained provocative and relevant through into the present day, where it can still and should most necessarily so be applied to the new problems faced by the world, such as technology, science, religion, communication, and general understanding.

An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding was published in 1748 and explores how we can come to know the world, examining the origin of our ideas and impressions, which he says can only derive from experience. He also grounds all operations of association, understanding, and inquiry in the mind in the relation of cause and effect, which he says we learn through experience, where certain objects appear to us to be more or less concomitant, and also we build our ideas of universals i.e. types of objects from seeing that certain objects have similar cause and effect relations with other objects in each instantiation in our experience.

He sets out the mission of the book in the introduction, which offers us a perennial toolkit for approaching differences in opinions and analysing new things that seem to conflict with our expectations or transcend the limits of comprehension.

An important theme inherent in the work is a focus on grounding an epistemology of the world in only what we can say with confidence. To derive this we must address the different languages used by philosophy and by such manner it comes to light that certain disagreements, the paradigmatic example being innatism and a priorism vs. empiricism, are dissolvable when we find that all complex ideas derive from a universal set of impressions and sensations which is universally shared by humankind.

Immanuel Kant speaks of Hume’s work as awakening him from his “dogmatic slumber”, reviving his philosophy and invigorating the lead up to his masterpiece, the Critique of Pure Reason.

There are many way we can see how the Critique extends Hume’s arguments in the Enquiry and elaborates on them directly, albeit in different language, with different words and in a different way of speaking.

When Kant speaks of the synthetic unity of all apperception—how the mind forms a sensible picture of the world which informs his reason—we can easily see how this connects to Hume’s exploration of how the experience of cause and effect as the experience of objects that are conjoined and consistently follow from each other—and this alone—is the only source from which reason and higher, a priori notions may come. In other words, both philosophers are saying that abstract reasoning and complex ideas and faculties of the mind are not fundamentally separate from, but instead derive from the sum of all our experiences, which we are able to thread together in a certain way which brings out certain patterns and consistencies which we can use being the kind of beings we are. It is a picture of emergence, and it is the mind trying to understand itself and its own grounds. This is why it is a transcendental enquiry.

Hume’s antidogmatism is with the goal of improving human understanding more generally, both individually and collectively. All complex ideas are made up of smaller ideas, which are the result of impressions deriving from sensation. Complex ideas come to be simple in time and correspond to certain impressions and then we go on to speak about them with others. Philosophical traditions build these complex ideas together and operate on a language with its own unique terms and association of ideas. For speakers of this language, there is agreement, mutual understanding, that the terms mean what they mean for each person has experienced the process of their construction. What may seem like confusion or disagreement to someone outside this tradition is a mere illusion, for when we strip the particularities from the picture, we find that our impressions and their associations are all the same, to the extent that we all experience a kind of shared world and therefore behave and feel things the same way.

Any kind of philosophy which seeks to go beyond this shared reality is needless. Abstruse abstraction is alienating and it is more desirable to keep things as simple as possible, so that we can be best understood, and so that we can communicate better with each other. Hume charges the metaphysics of his age with being too obscure. He shows how innate ideas is an unnecessary notion and ultimately can be shown to derive from experience.

We can imagine innate ideas as being those kind of tendencies which seem more programmed into a human individual from birth. These things do exist in various forms. The impact of development and upbringing at the earliest stages can be hard to see. And the body is constructed from a genetic script whose story extends far beyond the mere individual. Therefore individuals have their own uniquenesses which becomes the matter natural selection operates upon, and so on, and so on. But these peculiar ideas and behaviours which are more constant and less changeable in humans are still derived from experience. However, they derive from experiences had not by the given organism but by one of its ancestorss. Certain events informed the ancestors code for the construction of his offspring’s own mind. This corresponds to physiological changes in the body which can also be broken down into simple chains of cause and effect. The confusion happens when moving between levels of emergence. Fundamentally, all is one.

Explore our philosophy page for a deeper dive into the Humean approach to understanding.