A major theme throughout Hume’s Inquiry is cause and effect. He speaks about how we, as humans, often look for contingencies between events that aren’t necessarily there. He describes this as so automatic, there is not a way to change or unlearn this habit. Rather than attempting to do so, we can use this proclivity to our advantage. Why not shift our perspective to creating positive habits, which can then help us to become the kind of people we want to be?
Here are three major perspective shifts we can make to enrich our lives, in the areas of learning, relationships, and leadership.
Learning
“For if truth be at all within the reaches of human capacity, ‘tis certain it must lie every deep and abstruse, and to hope we shall arrive at it without pains, while the greatest geniuses have failed with the utmost pains, must certainly be esteemed sufficiently vain and presumptuous.”
Learning is strenuous, focused work. It will be difficult, at points. It is a lifelong process, and doesn’t conclude with a degree or employment. It is not dependent on what job you’re currently in. The desire and willingness to learn is arguably the most vital skill to success, across time and occupation.
Approaching learning with a willingness to work is often the difference between success and failure. Somewhere along the way, our society has begun to believe that if learning doesn’t come quickly or naturally, it must not be ‘meant for’ us. This is a false notion. Learning is defined as “the act or process of acquiring knowledge or skill”. This, by definition, requires effort.
If we want to advance our skills and ability to make wise, informed decisions, we must be willing to put in the work of acquiring the requisite knowledge.
Be willing to exert your energies on improving yourself.
Relationships
“Our judgments concerning cause and effect are derived from habit and experience; and when we have been accustomed to see one object united to another, our imagination passes from the first to the second, but a natural transition which precedes reflection, and which cannot be prevented by it.”
Hume details that tend toward habit, rather than rationally thinking through each and every interaction. On one hand, this allows our brains to conserve energy for mental processes which are especially taxing. On the other, it can result in faulty decision-making. For example, when our thoughts jump to conclusions which our rational minds would find ridiculous, we must allow our rational thinking to catch up with our spur-of-the-moment thoughts and come to a reasonable conclusion. We do much better, generally, when we think our thoughts over before speaking them or acting upon them. Your mother’s advice to ‘think before you speak’ is not only true, but often saves much trouble and mental anguish after the fact.
We tend to respond people according to habit and prior experience, rather than looking at pertinent facts objectively. We rely on our prior experience, either with the person in question or similar others, when making decisions.
A common example of this is seeing a scruffy looking person asking more money on the side of the road. You are reminded of the one time prior when you saw a similarly scruffy person drive off at the end of the day in their flashy convertible, which leads you to the conclusion that everyone who panhandles is simply trying to pull one over on society. Of course, we have no idea the facts or circumstances of the person before us, but, because we act out of habit, we’ve already decided against any further engagement with them.
Conversely, it can make us too trusting of people. It’s why we go out of our way to try to understand unbelievable accounts. It’s why we rationalize the behavior of others. Our minds want to make sense of people’s words and actions, but we neglect that people don’t usually act reasonably. We act out of impulse or, again, habit.
Perhaps, rather than attempting to rewire our human nature of relying on habit, we can simply cultivate the habit of thinking twice about the conclusions that present themselves to us. Maybe, by building the habit of being more thoughtful in our reactions to others, we can change our minds to not be so black and white, but open to more possibilities.
Leadership
“That whatever the mind clearly conceives includes the idea of possible existence.”
Hume is referring explicitly to his explanation of ideas necessarily having the property of existence. Taken more abstractly, we see this sentiment applied to leadership and goal setting quite often. Napoleon Hill would echo a similar truth less than one hundred years later, in 1937’s Think and Grow Rich,
“Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, the mind can achieve.”
Everything begins with an idea.
Hume is aware of our shortcomings. He realizes the limits of human cognition and perception, and desires to keep the study of them pristine. In the process, he is keeping empiricism humble. This is also what Hume exemplified himself, both in demonstrating his method in his examination of human thought, and in the mark he left on empiricism.
The legacy of Hume is that he brought the empirical method to studying human thought and idea. This discipline can be quite obscure for readers, however. In those instances, it is important to remember the historicity of this achievement. Just as Freud is credited with the founding of psychoanalysis, and went on to further refine his ideas, his contributions are most remarkable because they provide a starting point for the practice. Hume likewise provides a starting point for the study of human cognition apart from religion or superstition.
Empiricism explains and accounts for things we experience with explanations that are observable by the senses. Hume’s influence is seen in the Transcendentalist’s empirical approach to nature and man; observing nature and its affect on us objectively.
The contribution here to the scientific study of humanity is astounding. Hume’s purpose is very clear from the outset; to apply the same empirical observation and analysis of biology or gravity to the way the human mind works. It’s lofty, and at the time, verging on blasphemy, but Hume was willing to endure the labor and disdain of the church in order to advance our understanding of ourselves.
As Emerson was also a man of the church, I imagine he understood well the tension between Hume’s writings and the reception they received from the church. Perhaps this commitment to learning and endurance in the face of opposition inspired Emerson. It has inspired me.
Ed. note: This is the sixteenth entry in a series looking at the three schools of philosophy for perspectives on relationships in our modern world. Inspired by Emerson’s “The American Scholar,” we are exploring timeless wisdom which endures to inform our approaches to learning, relationships and leadership. Click here for all the posts in this series.
