Theatricality of Writing and Emotion in the Eighteenth Century British Print Culture: David Hume and the Making of Literary Career*

JIANG Wentao Zhejiang University

Abstract: The eighteenth century Britain witnessed a proliferation of modern print culture, which gives rise to the modern institution of the production of literary writing. David Hume and his moral philosophy writing are part of this mechanism in the making. This essay examines the transition of his treatise writing to essay writing as part of his maneuver of literary publications.It presents a history of materiality in writing through an investigation of its institutionalization, its dovetailing with the formation of modern theatrical selfhood, and a possible perceptual history of emotions in the genealogy of modern western subjectivity.

Keywords: print culture; emotion; theatricality; David Hume; eighteenth century

Foreword

In 1695, the Licensing Act, which had legalized censorship, was allowed to lapse. So did the monopoly rights it conferred on certain powerful printers and booksellers. In 1710, the English Copyright Act was passed to provide statutory protection for what was increasingly called “the property in the copy.”It was the first legal endorsement of what was to become copyright, whose intent is made clear through the statute’s full title: “An Act for the Encouragement of Learning by Vesting the Copies of Printed Books in the Authors or Purchasers of Such Copies.”

The proliferation of a print culture would encourage publishers to advertise authors and authors to advertise themselves. It is well studied that the European eighteenth century witnessed a historical, social and technological changes from “an oral-scribal to a print society,” which “had been building momentum since the invention of the printing press in the mid-fifteenth century,affected every area of social life, but nowhere was its force felt more directly and powerfully than in the world of writing and writers who lived hard by the printer’s workroom and the bookseller’s shop.”Samuel Johnson (1709—1784) lived through such an age and made a career similar to that of David Hume (1711—1776), the latter of which we are to examine in the rest of this essay. In his thoroughly investigated history of Johnson’s literary life in the age of print, Alvin Kernan points out: “Written work might be quite different from the products of a laborer worthy of his hire, or even, perhaps, the lands that a gentleman purchased or inherited.”The writer “created,” not just made, bought, or received his property. Thus, “authors,” as Johnson writes, had “a stronger right of property than that by occupancy; a metaphysical right, a right, as it were, of creation, which should from its nature be perpetual.”

This birth of modern author and intellectual copyright are described by Lionel Gossman as “the identification of works with individual graphically recorded utterances ［that］ led to a conception of literary creation as absolutely original production, arising out of and in some way embodying a unique, substantial and autonomous self.”This “unique, substantial and autonomous self” was legalized and therefore objectified by the 1710 English copyright Act as “an invention distinctive enough to be patented,”to use a phrase from Northrop Frye. Mark Rose shows in his important work on the invention of modern copyright that legal theorists such as William Blackstone (1723—1780) defined a literary work as consisting solely of its “style and sentiment.”“These alone constitute its identity,” Blackstone writes: “The paper and print are merely accidents,which serve as vehicles to convey that style and sentiment to a distance.”It was on the material“accidents” of “the paper and print” that the concept of literary property was formulated on the model of the landed estate by the eighteenth-century jurists of Blackstone’s kind. “Copyright as an absolute right of property, a freehold ‘grounded on labour and invention,’”that is. Thus in this blending of literary and legal discourses in the context of the contest over perpetual copyright, “the literary-property struggle generated a body of texts—parliamentary records, pamphlets, and legal reports—in which aesthetic and legal questions are often indistinguishable.”The legal history of copyright, indeed, had important consequences for literature that went beyond purely legal considerations, for it helped to solidify the literary author as a man of original genius (the author’s assumed gender in these discourses was invariably male) who created literary property by mixing his intellectual labor with the materials afforded him by nature—much as Locke had argued men created private property by mixing their labor with the land.

This essay situates the Scottish moral philosopher and essayist David Hume’s writing on passion, taste and his own life in the material history of the eighteenth century British print culture.Rather than a traditional intellectual history of Hume’s philosophical or historical thinking, it puts passages on passions (specifically in his A Treatise of Human Nature ［1739］) and aesthetics (in general) by Hume in the light of a bourgeoning print culture and the birth of modern selfhood. It,unlike conventional scholarship on moral philosophy or passions, takes the act of writing as its point of departure, and examines the relation between the modern technology of writing (the way Raymond Williams defines it),modern selfhood and the historical divisions of different genres of writing (moral philosophy and the essay, to be more specific) in the eighteenth century.

1. Sympathy, History and Writing

Adela Pinch argues that for most middle and late eighteenth century aesthetic theorists,sympathy “described not only interpersonal relationships but also relations between persons and representations.”Sympathetic sentiments are aroused through realistic objects or interpersonal relations, which can always move into aesthetic representations. One passage in David Hume’s Treatise’s discussion of compassion clearly suggests this:

A spectator of a tragedy passes thro’ a long train of grief, terror, indignation, and other affections, which the poet represents in the persons he introduces. As many tragedies end happily, and no excellent one can be compos’d without some reverses of fortune, the spectator must sympathize with all these changes, and receive the fictitious joy as well as every other passion.

This relation between sympathy and aesthetic representations begins to be common in eighteenth century Britain. Highly influenced by Hume, Adam Smith makes sympathy a more universal experience through the imagination of the spectators upon the agents in his The Theory of Moral Sentiments. For him, we “form some idea of his sensations” and even feel something“which, though weaker in degree, is not altogether unlike them,” and we do this by means of the imaginative experiment of placing ourselves in the agent’s circumstance: “［W］e enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him.”It is noteworthy that Smith emphasizes the aspect of the adverbial quality of sympathy—to feel sympathetically,that is, while Hume’s stress is on the process that sentiment is fictitious and manufactured, which is the well-maneuvered process of “a long train of grief, terror, indignation, and other affections”resulting most likely in a “joy.” In another passage on how sympathy is the “propensity” that we have “to receive by communication ［others’］ inclinations and sentiments, however different from,or even contrary to our own.”Hume writes on the importance of processing representation in the economy of passions:

’Tis indeed evident, that when we sympathize with the passions and sentiments of others,these movements appear at first in our mind as mere ideas, and are conceiv’d to belong to another person, as we conceive any other matter of fact.’ Tis also evident, that the ideas of the affections of others are converted into the very impressions they represent, and that the passions arise in conformity to the images we form of them.

In this economy of sympathy, it is of significance to grasp the procedure between ideas,identifying, impressing and conforming, through which a strong sense of temporality is suggested.Sentiment is treated as like “any other matter of fact.”

This might be categorized as part of the eighteenth century British civic humanism as suggested through Joseph Addison and Richard Steele in the first decade of the century. For them,sympathy and sociality are designated as the basis for “a new kind of virtue, which served national interests by promoting civility and, not incidentally, by strengthening Britain’s commerce with the rest of the trading world.”The subscribers to their journal The Spectator “were directors of the Bank of England ... goldsmiths, private bankers or moneylenders,” the largest group of which “included the ‘great body of secretaries, commissioners, clerks, and agents in the various branches of government, civil and military, required to carry on the war abroad and manage affairs at home.’”Thus it becomes their natural concern “to promote a polite and civilizing sense of participation in the new society being developed, acclimatizing its readers to market priorities and procedures and familiarizing them with codes and conventions of recognition and self-recognition appropriate to their place in a burgeoning world.”What is of interest in this essay is to situate Hume in a history of emotions and history of the writing media. Hume’s writing on passion and the act of his writing mean more than establishing a “polite culture” that mediates “as a validating and confidence-building network of relationships.”For Hume, writing is an experience of the newly popular print medium, which affects a historical understanding of empirical philosophy and identitarian mediation.

Hume carefully distinguishes the way passions derived from literature feel from those derived from real life. The “feelings of the passions” caused by poetical fictions are fainter than “what they are when they arise from belief and reality”: the passion “feels less firm and solid,” and it is but a “mere phantom”of the passion caused by reality. The absence of objects and circumstantial realities as enhanced by increasing communication and information flow becomes an issue of late eighteenth century aesthetic theory, which “frequently pondered how an emotional response to an image of a thing should be like and unlike a response to the thing itself.”The issue becomes complicated in the Humean transposition of a representational work of self into the new forum of print medium through the work of writing. It is part of what Jerome Christensen detects “the significance of the printing press to Hume’s philosophical project”—the relation of causation in both his epistemology of sense data and history:

When we infer effects from causes, we must establish the existence of these causes; which we have only two ways of doing, either by an immediate perception of our memory or senses, or by an inference from other causes; which causes again we must ascertain in the same manner,either by a present impression, or by an inference from their causes, and so on, till we arrive at some object, which we see or remember. It is impossible for us to carry on our inferences in infinitum; and the only thing, that can stop them, is an impression of the memory or senses,beyond which there is no room for doubt or enquiry.

For Hume, this “impression of the memory or the senses” exists merely in a procedural process. It is a means of mediation to something that, in another passage, is attributed to a remotely ancient historical past, the historical knowledge of which has a visual beginning:

Thus we believe that Cæsǝr was kill’d in the senate-house on the ides of March; and that because this fact is establish’d on the unanimous testimony of historians, who agree to assign this precise time and place to that event. Here are certain characters and letters present either to our memory or senses; which characters we likewise remember to have been us’d as the signs of certain ideas; and these ideas were either in the minds of such as were immediately present at that action, and receiv’d the ideas directly from its existence; or they were deriv’d from the testimony of others, and that again from another testimony, by a visible gradation,’till we arrive at those who were eye-witnesses and spectators of the event.

The certainty of a historical knowledge is caused by a chain of narration—a “visible gradation” to the original “eye-witnesses and spectators of the event.” The historical causation is manufactured into an establishment of a relational connection and continuity between units previously atomic and disparate.

This sympathetic epistemological and historical relation with “the original, indubitable testimony of an eyewitness to the historical event”would gradate as the intermediary connections increase. It can be assured, nonetheless, through “the republic of letters” and “the art of printing, ”“One edition passes into another, and that into a third, and so on, till we come to that volume we peruse at present. There is no variation in the steps. After we know one, we know all of them.”Thus, “Europe is at present a copy, at large, of what Greece was formerly a pattern in miniature.”Representations make not merely historical knowledge possible. History becomes loyally printed copies of what were before. The intermediary, as a consequence of the saturation of the print medium in the eighteenth century, occupies such a significant role of representation that what is supposed to be represented turns into it. The proliferation of the medium remediates what goes before and what comes after. It becomes more than a mere technical instrument through which the historical and sympathetic—or, sympathetically historical—causation is communicated.This strong sense of reliance upon the printing press for communicating an authentic historical knowledge exists in Hume’s epistemological, philosophical and affective projects. For him,experience as reflected in empirical epistemology and philosophy is interwoven with an obsession with emotion and passion. Communicating an “authentic self” to “the republic of letters” through the print medium creates a specific sociality that could be identified as a “literary career” of the mid-century for him. The work of writing puts him “in a position where he can repeat himself over and over again.”A career, a historical knowledge and a proprietary selfhood converge through the possibility made by the print medium.

It is specifically about the role of social sympathy— or sympathetic sociality— in Hume’s work of writing. An evil fanatic and the lord of a gloomy, gothic castle as regarded by his contemporary James Beattie (1735—1803),Hume establishes an economy of sympathy. As “a communication of sentiments,”sympathy is taken as a necessary part of the property transference in sentimental sociality:

We can form no wish, which has not a reference to society. A perfect solitude is, perhaps,the greatest punishment we can suffer. Every pleasure languishes when enjoyed a-part from company, and every pain becomes more cruel and intolerable. Whatever other passions we may be actuated by; pride, ambition, avarice, curiosity, revenge or lust; the soul or animating principle of them all is sympathy; nor would they have any force, were we to abstract entirely from the thoughts and sentiments of others. Let all the powers and elements of nature conspire to serve and obey one man; Let the sun rise and set at his command: The sea and rivers roll as he pleases, and the earth furnish spontaneously whatever may be useful or agreeable to him: He will still be miserable, till you give him some one person at least, with whom he may share his happiness, and whose esteem and friendship he may enjoy.

Here communicated and shared emotions are that of property, the importance of which to a Humean selfhood is even more than a transcendental possession of the universe. Solitude means scarcity and poverty. Sympathetic companionship implements a pleasurable and animating social selfhood. It is a sentimental sociality through a process of abstraction, during which Hume initiates a necessity of writing to make a self possible by not being merely a self, and to make a medial empiricism through print media as a literary property in the history of western Enlightenment.

A recent discussion suggests that the “event” of British Enlightenment, one that conventionally occupies roughly a half-century between the 1730s—1740s and the 1780s, emerged“as an effect of ” “proliferating mediations.”Hume’s writing and philosophy can be positioned under this theoretical and historical light. It is similar to his accounts of taste, through which, as Hume puts it, “considering myself as a man in general, ［I］ forget, if possible, my individual being and my peculiar circumstances.”It is a creation of a public life, bios politikos, in the market place of a literary career, through deploying the pen, one of what Jürgen Habermas calls “public organs,”a specific political economy of social and literary labor as an apparatus. In the context of incipient consumerism in the eighteenth century, labor in representing is not as production but as performance, a performance in the literary marketplace that “is nothing other than a theater.”Hume is aware of the danger of retreating (or advancing) “into a solitude (or a solidarity)that is either a solipsistic darkness or a violent method,”which would mean an absence of access to the public, and a loss of the ability of performing as a literary producer. With a fanatic, gloomy and gothic phobia upon such an obsession, he invests theatricality and performance as forms of literary and emotional labor through work of writing into the marketplace and theater of the printing press. Stephen Greenblatt observes that the new textual medium, indeed, presents a theater of performance through iterated function:

At the deepest level of the ［theatrical］ medium itself the motivation is the ... renewal of existence through repetition of the self-constituting act. The character repeats himself in order to continue to be the same character on the stage. Identity is a theatrical invention that must be reiterated if it is to endure.

In other words, the theatrical space of the textual medium provides the spatial and material base for the invention of an iterable identity that can be produced and reproduced through revising. Thus the Humean theatricality becomes therapeutic of the disease of solitude, and the social sentiment of sympathy provides the cure, which is materialized through acts of writing. Historically, the concept of sympathy, as in the phrase “sympathetic nervous system,” belongs in Graeco-Roman physiology and medicine and in particular figured significantly in Stoic thought.Hume may well have been familiar with the medical concept of sympathy, which is illustrated in a tripartite classification of causes of disease in parts of the body by James Crawford, a member of the Physiology Library to which Hume also belonged. Crawford was also a teacher of medicine at Edinburgh University where Hume was a student. He writes:

That a Part is affected by Protopathia, when it is essentially in itself lesed ［=diseased］, and owes not its Origin to any Communication from another Part. Or by Idiopathia, when tho’ it be essentially lesed, yet the hurt was at first propagated to it from some other Part. Or lastly,by Sympathy or Consent, when the Part in itself is yet whole and sound, and is only affected by the fault of some other Part ... Diseases by Consent are propagated from a Distance, (in which case only I shall consider them) either by long Muscles or Nerves.

This medical discourse of sympathy is frequently taken through the Scottish Enlightenment, and used “by physicians both in respect of physiology and physical sickness and also in respect of the psychology of physician/patient relations.”Hume’s anxiety of solitary sympathetic nerves motivates an ad infinitum theatricality in print medium through the iterable act of writing to foster a fragmentary identitarian existence, which obtains a sense of causation and continuity. Writing,while creating and curing more sympathy, is both poison and medicine.

2. Theatrical Presence in Print Medium and Masculinity in Medium Modernity

In this sense, “sympathy,” for Hume, refers to a feeling as well as a principle of communication of opinions. It correlates to issues of the emergence of modern subjectivity,individualism, and literary character through a history of mediation upon the body. In a phenomenological perspective upon the coming of modernity as reflected in early modern Spanish theater, William Egginton argues that examining relations of space is more significant for investigating a historical origin of modern “subjectivity.” He details the notion of “presence.” For Egginton, the medieval spatial conception that was “full”:

Rather than taking place in an empty, geometrically determined space in which stories can be played out in relative independence of the reality of the audience’s world, the hyperbolic solidity of the space of medieval drama reflected the instability of the distinction between the reality being represented and the reality of the representation.

The Spanish sixteenth century, as Egginton suggests, begins to witness a flattened space designating “the border between the real and the imaginary.” Thus it becomes a “screen,”along which exists the “empty space” of modern theater. This “theatrical space” “is constituted by the presence of bodies in it, as opposed to the place where bodies may be shown.”In regard to the relation between subjectivity and theatricality, Egginton writes:

This telescoping of separable spaces requires audiences to negotiate different levels of reality,which they do by means of characters or avatars, virtual selves that become conditioned to this new, fundamentally scopic organization of space, in which they watch and are watched watching; they become bodies saturated by the gaze.

Egginton’s suggestion of theatricality as a term of media analysis is helpful for our historical investigation of the print medium in the British eighteenth century. This new form of theatricality is manifested through an obsession of spatial presence, and in print medium, it offers a culture of abstraction in the “empty space” to be filled by iterable performative identities through the work of writing. Identity becomes a spatial presence, the absence of which is darkness and means nonidentity. Modern subjectivity comes through this act of filling, which is realized in Hume as writing and communicating through sympathy, analogous to the ad infinitum shifting visual perspectives of watching and being watched through the audience.

Contemporary philosopher Charles Taylor suggests that modernity can be read as that experience whose leitmotif is of inwardness and detachment from self, which allows the emergence of both the themes of self-control and of self-exploration. For him, this self is put into a visually“separate, autonomous sphere of inwardness, capable of being separated from itself—as agent and object—and acting upon, manipulating, or exploring itself in a state of disengagement.”While the concept of “agency” may be alien to the eighteenth century, this observation and discipline of a modern “self” through engaging and disengaging is reflected in Hume’s writing as periodic melancholy—a phobia of solitary being, away from the communicating space of writing. Charles Taylor puts this into a philosophical language of reflexivity: “What we turn to in radical reflexivity seems to demand description as something ‘inner.’ This spatial metaphor is irresistible to describe the ‘space’ opened by self-scrutiny.”The moment of producing an inward interiority, a spatial self-scrutiny that takes enormous labor and sentimentality, produces gothic melancholy. This reflexivity—the “Inner Eye,” according to Richard Rorty, is not new but an invention of the seventeenth century.Prior to Descartes and Locke, Rorty explains, there was no

conception of the human mind as an inner space in which both pains and clear and distinct ideas passed in review before a single Inner Eye ... The novelty was the notion of a single inner space in which bodily and perceptual sensations (“confused ideas of sense and imagination” in Descartes’s phrase), mathematical truths, moral rules, the idea of God, moods of depression, and all the rest of what we now call “mental” were objects of quasi-observation.

William Egginton takes a less intellectual, more materialistic approach to this serious problematic of the seventeenth century. He suggests that this was “a theatrical experience of spatiality, one in which viewers had learned to become disembodied spectators of an action that only involved them as characters, as virtual rather than actual participants.”It is of historical significance that this “inner eye” is emblematic of a modern reflexive subjectivity, which originates from the seventeenth century. Along with it comes a shifting concept and practice of theatrical spatiality of presence. In the eighteenth century this mediation of presence proliferated, and this theatrical space expands with the coming of the modern print medium. Philosophically, this needs an association with the notion of disengagement, as Taylor puts it:

Reason and human excellence require a stance of disengagement.

“Disengagement” here is a term of art, meaning a stance toward something which might otherwise serve to define our identity or purposes, whereby we separate ourselves from it by defining it as at best of instrumental significance.

The eighteenth-century Britain debated about taste and began to take disinterestedness as among its tradition of aesthetics. David Hume takes this as a device for disengaging, philosophically and experientially. This very sense of disinterestedness is specifically suggested by David Home’s change of his own family name. Considering Hume was the youngest son of a distinguished Scottish family in the system of primogeniture, he would not inherit his father’s estate and must leave Home behind. This change of family name is not merely about a new identity obtained, but also, more significantly, about a voluntary creation of identitarian spatial crevices between “home”and “not-home,” the filling of which requires a mediation of sympathetic sociality as presence and thus literary property. This is fulfilled through a theatrical performance of the pen apparatus in the modern print medium, which establishes an exchangeable space for the eighteenth century men of letters. Hume deviates or departs from a monolithic and normalized “I” so as to be productive of himself as a literary character and a literary career—“a versatile middleman.”

In “Of Essay-Writing,” Hume defines his identity as an “ambassador” between “the learned and conversable: ” “I shall give Intelligence to the Learned of whatever passes in Company, and shall endeavor to import into Company whatever Commodities I find in my native Country proper for their Use and Entertainment.”A role of the middle print medium is structurally possible out of its relation with the other two media: the scribal and learned usually taken as masculine,the oral and conversable as feminine. It is suggested by his turn from a not successful moral philosopher—“the least entertaining and least political of all eighteenth-century genres”of knowledge producers—to an essay writer. Essay writing is a new form of relationship and affiliation deploying the publicity of reason and emotion. In An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, Hume makes this point: “A gloomy, hair-brained enthusiast, after his death, may have a place in the calendar; but will scarcely ever be admitted, when alive, into intimacy and society,except by those who are as delirious and dismal as himself.”This suggests a strong sense of dependence regarding exertions and relations of co-workers in the social labor of writing. The dependence expresses an anxiety over the rising public: “The Public is the most capricious Mistress we can court.”In a strong repentant passage upon authorship, Hume writes:

But I am so sick of all those Disputes and so full of Contempt towards all factious Judgments and indeed towards the Prejudices of what is call’d the Public, that I repent heartily my ever having committed any thing to Print. Had I a Son I shou’d warn him as carefully against the dangerous Allurements of Literature as James did his Son against those of Women; tho if his Inclination was as strong as mine in my Youth, it is likely, that the warning would be to as little Purpose in the one Case as it usually is in the other.

Interestingly, the public medium is portrayed as feminine, that is, “the most capricious Mistress,”“dangerous Allurements of Literature” as analogous to “those of Women.” The dangerous and consumptive public is represented as a feminine sphere, which creates a career for him and makes work of writing a property for him, and it replaces the son that he never had. Thus Hume expresses a strong sense of castration in his work. The development of a literary career is an articulated anxiety over the absence of an authentic masculinity that demands a constant work of writing to meet its requirements. As Jerome Christensen writes: “Hume not only did not father a son, but the enabling condition of his career is to respond to the allure of the feminine public by a castration that makes authorship a necessarily barren romance.”As a matter of fact, Hume establishes “the imagery of mutilation and references to various texts as children” or as a corpulent body.In a letter to David Mallet, he writes:

The Truth is, I am entirely idle at present so far as regards writing; and I am very happy in that indolent State. My Friends tell me, that I will not continue long so, and that I will tire of having nothing to do but read and converse; but I am resolved to resist, as a Temptation of the Devil, any Impulse towards writing, and I am really so much ashamed of myself when I see my Bulk on a Shelf, as well as when I see it in a Glass, that I would fain prevent my growing more corpulent either way.

The accumulative quantity of work of writing is made analogous to the economy of the writer’s body. It communicates a sense of boredom and tedium upon literary labor, as well as a desire to be abstinent from an addiction to performative theatricality in the print medium. Hume seems to suggest that writing too much—production and reproduction in work, that is—would cause corpulence upon the body, and thus emaciate the body into that lacking sympathetic sentiments and virility.

Mary Poovey argues that the A Treatise of Human Nature, as Hume’s first publication, was already intended “to the marketplace of ideas, where writers competed for readers and respect.Without a university position and acutely aware of the rewards and punishments meted out to writers in the burgeoning age of print, Hume increasingly sought to turn what might have seemed like an unfortunate necessity—the imperative to please his audience—into a stylistic practice infused with philosophical and moral import.”This audience imagined as feminine might reflect“a pervasive cultural ambivalence repeatedly expressed toward women by would-be arbiters of culture and morality in this period.” It “expressed a mixture of loathing and admiration for the women whose consumption and production so indelibly marked the emergent consumer society.”This is also suggested by recent feminist criticism of the works of Jonathan Swift,Alexander Pope, and Samuel Richardson.In the way that “money functions as the standard of value,” “she functions strictly as the standard of taste.”Before this standard, Hume is obsessed with his fertility, health, and offspring. In this sense, he provides a case of masculinity as a defense strategy adopted in the coming of the print and literary modernity.

3. Personal History of Writing in the Grammatical Issues of Identity of the Enlightenment

This strategy is also manifested in the autobiographic piece “My Own Life,” the last essay that Hume wrote in his life. At the beginning of its last paragraph, we read: “To conclude historically with my own character. I am, or rather was (for that is the style I must now use in speaking of myself, which emboldens me the more to speak my sentiments); I was, I say….”The literary death of an “I” or “Home” makes a transactional scarcity in the commerce of writing.It actualizes Hume’s scribbling on “many a Quire of Paper, in which there is nothing contained but my own Inventions,” which is put at the beginning of his Treatise. Writing, thereby, becomes an aesthetic tool for self-fashioning in an economy of capitalism. In his final composition Hume writes retrospectively:

It is difficult for a man to speak long of himself without vanity; therefore, I shall be short. It may be thought an instance of vanity that I pretend at all to write my life; but this Narrative shall contain little more than the History of my Writings; as indeed, almost all my life has been spent in literary pursuits and occupations.

It is exactly in this “little more than the History of my Writings” that we have a theatrical imposition in print medium to satisfy the created discrepancy. This is a social consequence of moving away from a society that was dominated by “strategy rather than economy”into a literary culture of modern market economy. Ronald Paulson argues that Joseph Addison (1672—1719) “modulates the austere virtue of civic humanism into politeness, and extends the amenities across a broader spectrum of society, noting that the ‘man of a Polite Imagination’ feels ‘greater Satisfaction in the Prospect of Fields and Meadows, than another does in the Possession.” For Paulson, this aesthetic pleasure is “precisely because it is not his own property and he sees in it the perspective of commerce and paper money, rather than inheritance, upkeep, and tenantry.”In Hume, this sense of property in representation through work of writing is satisfied not merely in “the perspective of commerce and paper money,” but more in inscribing emotions through working as part of an interiorized and thus propertied selfhood.

This mapping of interior emotions is a means to socialize the relation between the writer and its public readers. It is made very clear in one of the passages taken from the Treatise:

We may infer from them ［the fleeing men］, that the uneasiness of being contemn’d depends on sympathy, and that sympathy depends on the relation of objects to ourselves; since we are most uneasy under the contempt of persons, who are both related to us by blood, and contiguous in place. Hence we seek to diminish this sympathy and uneasiness by separating these relations, and placing ourselves in a contiguity to strangers, and at a distance from relations.

The local sympathy from blood relations or geographic closeness is rather detrimental, and thus makes a salubrious sympathy at distances more necessary.

This role of benevolence of sympathy upon the body, whether of oneself or others, is among the moral philosophical agendas in the Scottish Enlightenment. For instance, Francis Hutcheson (1694—1746) takes sympathy as a fact that is included in his anti-Hobbesian doctrine.For Hutcheson, unlike a warring-state between individuals, benevolence is natural to humans.By sympathy or compassion, as Hutcheson writes: “［w］e are dispos’d to study the Interest of others, without any Views of private Advantage ... Every Mortal is made uneasy by any grievous Misery he sees another involv’d in, unless the Person be imagin’d evil, in a moral Sense: Nay,it is almost impossible for us to be unmov’d, even in that Case.”In Hume, the provincial“strategy” gives way to economically relational “contiguity to strangers.” Or, “ourself ... is in reality nothing.”What wants in geographic and physical “reality” needs fueling in global and representational “fiction” through writing, by which a “freely” self-actualizing personality is achieved. This economy of scarcity or a fictionalized self of sentimental deprivation is captured by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in their analysis of the capitalist deformation of desire:the “deliberate creation of lack as a function of the market economy is the art of a dominant class.”Thus, the Humean self becomes a necessity of production in a literary career in the early commerce of capitalism in the literary market. With those “as delirious and dismal as himself”and “in a contiguity to strangers, and at a distance from relations,” the Humean self is always in the practice of a “process,” to put it in the term that Northrop Frye used to characterize the artistic formations of the “age of sensibility.”It is a career of the men of letters, and its practice, like the society whose economy his career reflects, is “maintained at a continuous present by various devices of repetition.”A repetition of the imposition of a fictional self into a system of rational abstraction is a move “from observed particulars to general claims about universals like ‘man’ by claiming that their universals were somehow derived from an additive process that identified the‘greatest good of the greatest number’ by looking at the philosopher’s (representative) self.”For the British and more frequently Scottish moral philosophers of the eighteenth century, “the problem epitomized by identity becomes the problem of philosophy.”“Considering myself as a man in general, ［I must］ forget, if possible, my individual being and my peculiar circumstances,”as Hume writes in “Of the Standard of Taste.”

Jerome Christensen argues that, for Hume and his fellow men of letters, “the general term that subsumed ‘discourse’ and ‘conversation’ was ‘correspondence’” and it is that “in the empiricist epistemology knowledge depends on the correspondence or analogy between sense impressions and mental ideas.”Mary Poovey examines Hume’s repudiation of experimental moral philosophy and his turn to the genre of the essay writing, and writes that:

［The］ eighteenth century attempts to produce knowledge about a universal subject through experiment coexisted with another kind of knowledge project, which sought not so much to generate facts about a universal subjectivity as to engage readers’ subjective response in the service of producing something else, which eighteenth-century writers variously called conversation, moral emulation, and self-improvement.

The concluding part of Book I of Hume’s Treatise suggests a case of this experiment with conversation, the epistemological correlation it promotes, and the sympathetic sociality that such experiment and knowledge production build. Hume writes:

But setting aside some metaphysicians of this kind, I may venture to affirm of the rest of mankind, that they are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.Our eyes cannot turn in their sockets without varying our perceptions. Our thought is still more variable than our sight; and our other senses and faculties contribute to this change;nor is there any single power of the soul, which remains unalterably the same, perhaps for one moment. 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.

Self is put into a flux of theatrical performance. The physical phenomena accessible to sight and perceptions succeeding each other “with an inconceivable rapidity” contribute to a constantly altering soul at any moment. To put it in another way, the identitarian existence becomes an experiment through its relation with various “others” to encounter “in a contiguity to strangers.”Rather than realized in (moral) philosophical self-reflection, this self is more like a procession illustrated in a natural philosophy laboratory experiment that is indispensable with representations:

We must therefore glean up our experiments in this science from a cautious observation of human life, and take them as they appear in the common course of the world, by men’s behavior in company, in affairs, and in their pleasures. Where experiments of this kind are judiciously collected and compared, we may hope to establish on them a science, which will not be inferior in certainty, and will be much superior in utility to any other of human comprehension. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, xviiixix.

Self-reflection and premeditation yield to observation of “others,” which is made possible by a burgeoning quantity of anthropological materials supplied through traders, travelers, missionaries,and colonial administrators in the century. The Treatis illustrates a sympathetic “science” to experiment with general human understanding “in company, in affairs, and in their pleasures.”This ethnographical approach to experiential data as a necessary extension of self is expressed more explicitly in Hume’s An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding:

Records of wars, intrigues, factions, and revolutions are so many collections of experiments,by which the politician or moral philosopher fixes the principles of his science, in the same manner as the physician or natural philosopher becomes acquainted with the nature of plants,minerals, and other external objects, by the experiments which he forms concerning them.

Selfhood is put under the gaze of a medical physician and a natural philosopher. It is, in a sense, observed as an experimental object. Thus, subjectivity is achieved as a visual sympathy or understanding. It is theatrically established, and always remains in fluidity of conversable exchanges.

The theatrical mind stage of Hume’s is not a tabula rasa. It is a social stage representing a causal continuity as a performative and articulating an identity. Hume famously writes:

... all the nice and subtile questions concerning personal identity can never possibly be decided, and are to be regarded rather as grammatical than as philosophical difficulties.Identity depends on the relations of ideas; and these relations produce identity, by means of that easy transition they occasion. But as the relations, and the easiness of the transition may diminish by insensible degrees, we have no just standard, by which we can decide any dispute concerning the time, when they acquire or lose a title to the name of identity. All the disputes concerning the identity of connected objects are merely verbal, except so far as the relation of parts gives rise to some fiction or imaginary principle of union.

The sense of temporality in the transfer of different perceptions and relations of ideas regarding the organization of an identity leads to “the History of my Writings” (emphasis mine.): “Thus we feign the continu’d existence of the perceptions of our senses, to remove the interruption; and run into the notion of a soul, and self, and substance, to disguise the variation.” Hume admits in the very grammar of his sentence:

I cannot compare the soul more properly to any thing than to a republic or commonwealth in which the several members are united by the reciprocal ties of government and subordination,and give rise to other persons, who propagate the same republic in the incessant changes of its parts. And as the same individual republic may not only change its members, but also its laws and constitutions; in like manner the same person may vary his character and disposition, as well as his impressions and ideas, without losing his identity. Whatever changes he endures,his several parts are still connected by the relation of causation. And in this view our identity with regard to the passions serves to corroborate that with regard to the imagination, by making our distant perceptions influence each other, and by giving us a present concern for our past or future pains or pleasures.

The self is more like a segregation of different parts, which may change with relations and transitions of ideas. As a “fiction or imaginary principle of union,” the identity issue is dependent upon “the relation of causation” to construct a future history.

4. Causation in Print Medium as Empirical Philosophy

What remains of significance for Hume is that of “relation of causation.” It is not explicitly stated in Shaftesbury’s aesthetics. As a key issue in Hume’s philosophy, it is contoured by a principle of property in Hume’s construction of aesthetics. This is correlated as an epistemological question. Hume writes in the “Appendix” to the Treatise:

Philosophers begin to be reconcil’d to the principle, that we have no idea of external substance, distinct from the ideas of particular qualities. This must pave the way for a like principle with regard to the mind, that we have no notion of it, distinct from the particular perceptions. If perceptions are distinct existences, they form a whole only by being connected together. But connexions among distinct existences are ever discoverable by human understanding. We only feel a connexion or determination of the thought, to pass from one object to another. It follows, therefore, that the thought alone finds personal identity, when reflecting on the train of past perceptions, that compose a mind, the ideas of them are felt to be connected together, and naturally introduce each other.

Introspective identity becomes that of an iterable process of being connected. An intellectual labor of “thought” is needed to make a “train,” thus a history of perceptions and ideas so as to maintain a continuity of the “distinct existences.” It creates crevices between fragments and parts,and anticipates what Ira Livingston detects as “disciplinarity” in the “portable panopticon” of the Romantic poetry: “a plaid, a pattern of patterns that works not being radiated from a center but generating correspondences among nodes in multiple networks.”This poetics of processive parts is manifested in a materialist and property-like form through the publication history of the Treatise. Jerome Christensen examines this in details:

Although the first edition was published in 1739 and 1740 (and remained unsold in 1756),sections of the Treatise appeared in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748),An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751), and the essay ‘Of Passions’ (1752);another portion was intended for the ‘Fourth Dissertation,’ which was never set up in print.The Treatise appeared under the imprint of three publishers: books 1 and 2 were printed by John Noon; book 3 was originally published by Thomas Longmans; and Andrew Millar published all the later reworkings of the Treatise during Hume’s lifetime.

In a metaphoric sense, human nature and understanding of an identity is never an organic unity. Rather, it consists of various parts materialized and realized through different compositions.The body of work finds it analogous in the forms of a book and aesthetics of selfhood. It demands intellectual labor and work of writing through a corresponding public organ of the pen. In other words, to establish a relation of this kind is Hume’s strategy to accumulate his capital achieved on a limited labor and lifetime. The aesthetics upon a fragmentary self has obtained a material history in the print medium of the eighteenth century. This poetics about parts constitutes the creation of an emotional selfhood through work of writing. As a process, the dispersion of the work of writing and the knowledge it produces is analogous to the constancy of revision, and partition.This uniformed replication allowed by the printing press makes the birth of the modern author.The copyrighted relation to the mechanically reproduced knowledge with the author is what“connects,” which is a relation impossible previous to the print culture. It is part of the historical proposition made through modernity like the financial revolution of the 1690s, during which, as J.G. A. Pocock argues, a crisis in the traditional association of landed property with propriety was precipitated:

Property moved from being the object of ownership and right to being the subject of production and exchange, and ... effect of this on the proposition that property was the basis of social personality ［which］ was to make personality itself explicable in terms of a material and historical process of diversification, refinement and perhaps ultimate decay and renewal.

The print medium creates a publicity of “personal idiosyncrasies,” “private thoughts,” and“consciousness of self” that maintain the continuity of identity through production (writing),exchange (publication), and reproduction (revision or refinement, or re-edition).

For Hume, the capital realized through the publicity of print medium is that of scarcity, which is unequally distributed through an economy of emotions: “There is no such passion in human minds, as the love of mankind, merely as such, independent of personal qualities.”Emotion exists merely as a reflection of a diversity of personalities. This, however, does not mean that there does not exist universality of human love or understanding:

The skin, pores, muscles, and nerves of a day-labourer are different from those of a man of quality: So are his sentiments, actions and manners. The different stations of life influence the whole fabric, external and internal; and different stations arise necessarily, because uniformly,from the necessary and uniform principles of human nature. Men cannot live without society,and cannot be associated without government. Government makes a distinction of property,and establishes the different ranks of men. This produces industry, traffic, manufactures, lawsuits, war, leagues, alliances, voyages, travels, cities, fleets, ports, and all those other actions and objects, which cause such a diversity, and at the same time maintain such an uniformity in human life.

Analogous to the train of perceptions, feelings and opinions are made into a bundle of the grammatical issue of identity. The republic is composed of a diversity of careers, between which“an uniformity in human life” is somehow established through association and exchanges in the public. The “distinction of property” and “different ranks of men” work into a sentimental economy of accordance, similar to a processive construction of a personal identity. The necessary mediation from the government takes the “relation of causation” further into a distinction between nature and culture, self and society, external and internal, sensibility and commerce. It forms diversifications and fragments. A self is a composition of ad infinitum partitions. It can claim itself as a property in its structural relation with others, physical and affective, exterior and interior. This probably explains, for Hume, that “History” of his self “shall be short.” It is not merely because of what Hume claims as “difficult for a man to speak long of himself without vanity,”but more significantly, of just a practical impossibility to reiterate all the processes and qualities. Literally,it is beyond human to re-live the life as it has gone through different impressions, perceptions, and ideas in the Humean process of “identity.” Nevertheless, it is beyond “little more than the History of my Writings.”

It is exactly this “little more than the History of my Writings” in Hume that initiates and actualizes a grammatical and fictionalized Humean self-identity, which presents as a concrete example of objectifying the personal in an exchange economy of the print. After all, it is in between “Home” and “Hume”— “home” and “not being home”—that the name change was made at the first place. This initiation makes possible a realization of theatrical medium in a writing career through its “imposition of borders” and “placing, framing, situating” in a sentimental sociality of sympathy. Theatricality is realized in the presence in print and literary medium, which becomes iterable and iterated in Hume’s empiricism and discourse of experience.

At the end of the discussion of how sympathy explains our esteem for the rich and powerful,Hume remarks: “The minds of men are mirrors to one another, not only because they reflect each other’s emotions, but also because those rays of passions, sentiments and opinions may be often reverberated, and may decay away by insensible degrees.”Emotions, indeed, play a very significant role in the Humean empiricist epistemology upon selfhood. The affective correspondence with others—sympathy, that is—“appears to be a phenomenon that complicates the ‘mechanistic’ or Newtonian aspects of Hume’s understanding of force, impression, and idea and reverses the unidirectional fading of force.”The correspondence could be unidirectional,however, once it involves the relation between our own minds and the world of matter. The move is more from exteriority to interiority, from high social power to less so: “No internal impression has an apparent energy, more than external objects have. Since, therefore, matter is confess’d by philosophers to operate by an unknown force, we shou’d in vain hope to attain an idea of force by consulting our own minds.”This particular correspondence is situated in a particular relation of power, as Hume puts it in one of his ethical thought experiments:

’Tis evident, that tho’ all passions pass easily from one object to another related to it, yet this transition is made with greater facility, where the more considerable object is first presented,and the lesser follows it, than when this order is revers’d, and the lesser takes precedence.Thus ‘tis more natural for us to love the son upon account of the father, than the father upon account of the son; the servant for the master, than the master for the servant; the subject for the prince, than the prince for the subject.

Or, as he explains in such terms: “our passions, like other objects, descend with greater facility than they ascend.”Passions, like other materials, are more of communicative attitudes than of subjective feelings. They are maintained through a system of hierarchy and order. It is an issue of impression and force upon the mind, which are property-like regarding their significances to form a Humean identity. At another level, for Hume, passion is invested in labor in a democratic sense,which, in turn, produces property.There is a form of literary labor “that annexes it to commodity production under the rubric of passion,”as suggested in Hume’s essay “Of Commerce: ”“Everything in the world is purchased by labour; and our passions are the only causes of labour.”Passion, as causes of literary labor, is put into the circulation of literary commodities,and the neutralizing literary market serves as the only standard to judge.