Re-Placing Hume

research in phenomenology 45 (�0�5) �6�–�67 Research in Phenomenology brill.com/rp Re-Placing Hume Bernard Freydberg David Hume: Platonic Philosopher, Continental Ancestor. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012. 154 pp. Empiricist. Skeptic. Proto-analytic philosopher. These are the terms one might use to draw a quick sketch of David Hume. But Bernard Freydberg claims that these terms fail to capture, and actually cover over, essential dimensions of Hume’s thought. In arguing that Hume is a “Platonic Philosopher” and a “Continental ancestor,” Freydberg wishes to reshape our conception of Hume’s place in the history of philosophy, both in relation to what preceded him and in relation to what followed. The key terms in this book’s subtitle represent a large portion of Freydberg’s scholarly career, consisting of extensive writings on Plato and on the phenom- enological tradition. To his reading of Hume he thus brings a wealth of previ- ous research to the table, including highly specific readings of Plato and of the role of the imagination in Continental philosophy. Standing in the tradition which denies that Plato was a ‘Platonist,’ Freydberg’s meaning of the term ‘Platonic’ has nothing to do with a belief in eternal forms but, rather, mainly refers to a philosophical and rhetorical approach oriented by a view of severe limits to human knowing. Thus the this book’s first main thesis, that Hume is a Platonic thinker, becomes immediately more comprehensible, insofar as he bases it in large part on the argument that Hume’s particular form of skepticism is a reenactment of Socratic ignorance (as paradigmatically found in the Apology). Freydberg’s second main thesis, that Hume is a precursor to Continental philosophy, is based on his argument that the faculty of imagination is fundamental in Hume’s thought, both in Hume’s positive claims and in his form of expression. This, in my view, is the more challenging view to defend, and indeed upon finishing the book I found the ‘Platonic’ side of the book to be more fully persuasive and fully developed than the ‘Continental’ side. Yet on both themes Freydberg gives perceptive and important readings of Hume and his place in the Western tradition. Freydberg’s book consists primarily of his treatment of three of Hume’s texts, the first and second Enquiries and “On the Standard of Taste.” His method is to proceed chronologically through each of these texts, providing commentary © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��5 | doi �0.��63/�569�640-��34�306 162 Review Articles on the main sections of each one and allowing the structure of Hume’s texts to guide his own. Within this style of running commentary, however, Freydberg has Socrates as a near-constant companion, engaging in regular and detailed discussions of Platonic dialogues relevant to the Humean topic at hand. The result is a text generally structured by the order of Hume’s own concerns, but one that still feels fresh and spontaneous along the way. As mentioned above, the primary means by which Freydberg argues for Hume’s being a Continental ancestor is his claim that the foundations of Hume’s thought rest on the faculty of the imagination. Freydberg’s inspiration for this thesis is Deleuze’s book on Hume,1 which argues that the ‘association of ideas’ (resemblance, contiguity, cause and effect) central to Hume’s Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (EHU) is an association executed by the faculty of imagination. Freydberg argues, in the chapter he devotes to the first Enquiry, that the imagination is what creates the connection between impres- sions such that we understand one to be a cause and another an effect. To quote Hume in a passage that is central for Freydberg: “This connexion, therefore, which we feel in the mind, this customary transition of the imagination from one object to its usual attendant, is the sentiment or impression from which we form the idea of power or necessary connexion” (EHU, 75). Hume does not elaborate here on how precisely the imagination engages in this “customary transition” from one object to another, leaving Freydberg to wonder out loud if the imagination is itself doing the feeling of the impression, or if it merely “carries this feeling of transition into the future” (36). While he provides no response to this question, he proceeds to give this perceptive reading of what Hume’s assertion implies: “What is called experience amounts to imaginal tran- sitions, that is, to the flux of images to which we are given over. Imagination together with the flow of images is anterior to any determinations such as active/passive, subjective/objective” (37). As we have the experience of sens- ing one image after another (after another), the imagination is what connects some of them together into what Freydberg calls “collections of relative fixity within the flow,” that is, “guiding images” which give us the belief that we are making some sense of the flow. In one of the most concisely astute moments in this book, Freydberg then states that the idea of cause and effect is “an inter- pretation of the flow of images . .” (p. 37). Imagination clumps together two or more images and thereby interprets the unending cascade; that is, imagination gives this cascade an order and a structure (which by definition is impossible to confirm or disconfirm). In his reading, then, Freydberg sees Hume as placing 1 Gilles Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature, trans. Constantin V. Boudouris (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). research in phenomenology 45 (2015) 161–167.

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