David Hume on How Not to Lose Your Mind

Barry Brownstein
AIER

On election night, the then editor-in-chief of Scientific American, Laura Helmuth, wrote on social media platform BlueSky,

Helmuth is not the only one who lost her mind. Her all-too-human flaws place each of us at a crossroads: will we react to her with mockery, or will we learn from her mistake?

Why did Helmuth, who has since resigned, risk her career with an outburst of arrogant rage? While others were distraught, they did not resort to such extremes.

Imagine David Hume, the 18th-century Scottish classical liberal philosopher, sitting with Helmuth. In that case, he might gently ask why are you hyper-focused on defending your identity as a Trump hater? Why do you place paramount importance on engaging the stream of thinking in your head? 

What makes you, you? Hume might ask her. Hume, despite his efforts, failed to discover a unified self. What he did find were discreet feelings and perceptions. Hume wondered, where is the ‘me’ experiencing those feelings and perceptions?

In his A Treatise of Human Nature, we find one of Hume’s most famous passages: 

For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I can never catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception. 

Hume understood that “the mind is a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, re-pass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations.” 

Insightfully, Hume argued that our identity is constructed through our attempts to unify our different perceptions. Our stories about who we are harden into a self-made prison with boundaries that greatly restrict our choices. For example, a person who experiences many angry feelings associated with their perceptions might call themselves an angry person. Identifying as an angry person is a way to dodge responsibility for their actions. 

Hume made a regular practice of self-inquiry. A simple exercise can activate your faculty of metacognition. Imagine yourself sitting in a theater where the character you call me is going through its antics on the stage. Hume points us to this: if we can be aware of our antics, thoughts, feelings, and perceptions, we must be more than all these things.

Instinctively, we associate the character on stage with our true selves. Hume challenged this notion by asking this question: “What then gives us so great a propension to ascribe an identity to these successive perceptions, and to suppose ourselves possest of an invariable and uninterrupted existence through the whole course of our lives?” 

The answer is our imaginative, storytelling mind. The mind is wired to unify our different perceptions in a self-concept. We imagine objects and thoughts happening in an unbroken sequence. All of us, Hume observed, “have a distinct idea of an object, that remains invariable and uninterrupted through a supposed variation of time; and this idea we call that of identity or sameness.” 

To stabilize the identity we create, Hume explains, we “feign the continued existence of the perceptions of our senses.”

Again, a simple exercise in self-observation can validate Hume’s insight. Notice a grievance that you harbor. To keep that grievance going, you need to return to and dwell on thoughts of your grievance. The moment you ignore those thoughts, the grievance vanishes and stops defining your identity.

Yet, some people are loathe to give up grievances that have been incorporated into their identity. They may hold on to a grievance for dear life, for they can’t imagine who would I be without it? 

Hume’s insight is not just applicable to grievances. This line of reasoning can be applied to any mental disturbance we repeatedly entertain. Training our mind to go beyond the limits of the rigid identity we create is a wise practice.

In all his self-inquiries, Hume found, “There is no impression constant and invariable. Pain and pleasure, grief and joy, passions and sensations succeed each other, and never all exist at the same time.”

Hume’s advice for Helmuth and the rest of us might be to get outside, take a walk, enjoy your partner, your children, your friends, and engage your neighbor. You will find your grievance is gone.

Our grievance will reappear only when we choose to engage with it again. Our belief in permanence is a fabrication. Our emotional freedom lies in recognizing that we can let go of our grievances. Isn’t that relief?

Sadly, emotional freedom may not be in our sight. Despite our errors that we can easily recall, we double down and up the ante. Hume provides a clear metaphor of our intellectual arrogance: 

Methinks I am like a man, who having struck on many shoals, and having narrowly escaped shipwreck in passing a small frith, has yet the temerity to put out to sea in the same leaky weather-beaten vessel, and even carries his ambition so far as to think of compassing the globe under these disadvantageous circumstances. 

Hume was not posturing when he wrote, “When I turn my eye inward, I find nothing but doubt and ignorance.” He asked this question: “For with what confidence can I venture upon such bold enterprises, when beside those numberless infirmities peculiar to myself, I find so many which are common to human nature?” 

It’s no surprise that Hume was a man of radical humility. Of himself, he wrote, “My memory of past errors and perplexities, makes me diffident for the future. The wretched condition, weakness, and disorder of the faculties, I must employ in my enquiries, encrease my apprehensions.”

Hume instructs, “If we assent to every trivial suggestion of the fancy; beside that these suggestions are often contrary to each other; they lead us into such errors, absurdities, and obscurities, that we must at last become ashamed of our credulity.”

How gullible we are to believe our stream of thinking. How embarrassed we’d be if others could read our mind and see we are defending a self-concept born out of faith in the accuracy and permanency of our perceptions. 

Passing impressions may lead us astray. The guidance we need is found in principles and values. Hume advised himself and us, “I am uneasy to think I approve of one object, and disapprove of another; call one thing beautiful, and another deformed; decide concerning truth and falsehood, reason and folly, without knowing upon what principles I proceed.”

Hume was remarkably 250 years ahead of science. Neuropsychologist and professor Chris Niebauer writes: “Mistaking the voice in our head for a thing and labeling it ‘me’ brings us into conflict with the neuropsychological evidence that shows there is no such thing.”

If we allow our thoughts to define us, the voice in our head will dominate us like an oppressive ruler from within. Niebauer observes, “We may become angry, offended, sexually aroused, happy, or fearful, and we do not question the authenticity of these thoughts and experiences.”

Hume helps us realize that “there is no impression constant and invariable”; we may not be interpreting our world correctly. With that understanding, we achieve inner freedom and can avoid being swept up in irrational impulses. 

If people understood that their every fan

This article was originally published by the American Institute for Economic Research.