| OCR Text |
Show Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume I: The Humean Conception 533 Humean belief in A Progress of Sentiments. There she drew heavily on Hume's remarks at T 118-120 about the causal influence of belief on the will, passions, and action, in order to resist the implications of Hume's infamous claim at T 415 that "[r]eason is, and out only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them." Baier argued as follows: Belief and obsessive or even passing thoughts influence our passions and motives, and so influence our will. Hume takes this point to be already established long before he gets to his most famous and infamous Book Two claims about the impotence of "reason alone" to produce or prevent any action. He begins the resumed discussion by claiming that popular and traditional philosophical talk of ‘the combat of passion and reason' is strictly nonsense (T 413-415). Since passions incorporate the influence of reason, since they presuppose beliefs, they would be in combat with themselves if they resisted the influence of belief (159). The final sentence of the above citation is not to be found in Hume's Treatise. Rather, it is Baier's own reasoning in defense of Hume's claim in the preceding sentence. In the following chapter I suggest how very much at odds it is with the other, surrounding claims Hume makes in that section. But for present purposes it is sufficient to note Baier's (1) implicit recognition of the distinction between the passions on the one hand and reason/belief on the other; and (2) seeming equation of belief "and obsessive or even passing thoughts" with that reason which Hume argues repeatedly is reducible to custom and habit. In Baier's Progress of Sentiments, then, the fundamental distinction is between the passions, and the habits of thought we identify as reason and/or belief. However, Hume's characterization of belief as itself "an act of the sensitive, [rather] than of the cogitative part of our natures" (T 183; italics in text) may have led Baier to rethink this seeming equation. If that which "influence[s] our passions and motives, and so influence our will" (PS 159) is "an act of the sensitive [rather] than of the cogitative part of our natures" (T 183), whereas "reason … exerts itself without producing any sensible emotion" (T 417), then clearly it is the sensitive part of our natures rather than reason that influences our passions, motives and will for Hume; and "belief and obsessive or even passing thoughts" may, as sensitive, enter into the "reflective survey" (MP 812) conducted by the passions upon all of our habits and customs. Thus in Moral Prejudices, belief and the passions are on the same, "sensitive" and motivationally effective side of our natures, whereas reason is on the "cogitative" and motivationally impotent side. The passions administer the most authoritative survey of our customs and habits because only the passions, guided by their sensitive beliefs, can change them. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
