David Hume* continued in the empiricist tradition of John Locke, believing that the source of all genuine knowledge is our direct sense experience. As we have seen, this empiricist approach had led Locke to a number of surprising conclusions regarding the self, including the belief that the self’s existence is dependent on our consciousness of it. In Locke’s view, your self is not tied to any particular body or substance, and it only exists in other times and places because of our memory of those experiences. Using the same empiricist principles as Locke, Hume ends up with an even more startling conclusion—if we carefully examine our sense experience through the process of introspection, we discover that there is no self! How is this possible? From Hume’s perspective, this astonishing belief is the only possible conclusion consistent with an honest and objective examination of our experience. The following passages are from Hume’s essay “On Personal Identity.”
According to Hume, if we carefully examine the contents of our experience, we find that there are only two distinct entities, “impressions” and “ideas”:
Impressions—Impressions are the basic sensations of our experience, the elemental data of our minds: pain, pleasure, heat, cold, happiness, grief, fear, exhilaration, and so on. These impressions are “lively” and “vivid.”
Ideas—Ideas are copies of impressions, and as a result they are less “lively” and “vivid.” Ideas include thoughts and images that are built up from our primary impressions through a variety of relationships, but because they are derivative copies of impressions they are once removed from reality.
If we examine these basic data of our experience, we see that they form a fleeting stream of sensations in our mind and that nowhere among them is the sensation of a “constant and invariable” self that exists as a unified identity over the course of our lives. And because the self is not to be found among these continually changing sensations, we can only conclude that there is no good reason for believing that the self exists. Hume goes on to explain:
“I can never catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception.” Even when we actively look for the self, Hume contends, we simply can’t find it! All of our experiences are perceptions, and none of these perceptions resemble a unified and permanent self-identity that exists over time. Furthermore, when we are not experiencing our perceptions—as when we sleep—there is no reason to suppose that our self exists in any form. Similarly, when our body dies and all empirical sensations cease, it makes no sense to believe that our self continues to exist in some form. Death is final. And what of people who claim that they do experience a self in their stream of perceptions? Hume announces that “I must confess I can reason no longer with him. . . . He may, perhaps, perceive something simple and continued, which he calls himself; though I am certain there is no such principle in me.” In other words, as an empiricist, Hume cannot do more than provide an honest description and analysis of his own experience, within which there is no self to be found. But if Hume is right, then why does virtually everybody but Hume believe with certainty that they do have a self-identity that persists through time and serves to unify their life and give it meaning? After all, it’s not enough to say to the rest of the world: You’re wrong, and I’m right, and I’m not going to discuss the issue if you insist on disagreeing with me. Let’s examine Hume’s explanation of the self that most people would claim they experience.
What is the self we experience according to Hume? A “bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.” Humans so desperately want to believe that they have a unified and continuous self or soul that they use their imaginations to construct a fictional self. But this fictional self is not real; what we call the self is an imaginary creature, derived from a succession of impermanent states and events. What is our mind? According to Hume, it’s “a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance, pass, repass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations.”
Analyzing Hume on the Absence of Self
Perform your own empiricist investigation by examining the contents of your consciousness. What do you find there? Fleeting and temporary sensations, perceptions, and ideas, as Hume describes? Is your self anywhere to be found?
Hume uses the terms I and myself throughout his writings, words that seem to suggest a continually existing self-identity that he is denying. Does Hume contradict himself? Why or why not?
Descartes’s key point was that even if we are dreaming, fantasizing, or being deceived, the act of doubting proves that I have a self that is engaged in the activity of doubting. Is the same true for Hume? By denying the existence of a self, is he at the same time proving that his self exists, the self that is engaged in the act of denying? Why or why not?
If you believe that you have a unifying and conscious self that exists through time but you can’t “catch yourself” when you examine your immediate experience, then where does your self exist? What is the nature of your self if you can’t perceive it? (This is precisely the challenge taken up by our next philosopher, Immanuel Kant.)