David Hume, Intellectual Arbitrage, and the Grounds of True Freedom

On the other Hand, Learning has been as great a Loser by being shut up in Colleges and Cells, and secluded from the World and good Company. By that Means, every Thing of what we call Belles Lettres became totally barbarous, being cultivated by Men without any Taste of Life or Manners, and without that Liberty and Facility of Thought and Expression, which can only be acquir'd by Conversation. Even Philosophy went to Wrack by this moaping recluse Method of Study, and became as chimerical in her Conclusions as she was unintelligible in her Stile and Manner of Delivery. And indeed, what cou'd be expected from Men who never consulted Experience in any of their Reasonings, or who never search'd for that Experience, where alone it is to be found, in common Life and Conversation?

'Tis with great Pleasure I observe, That Men of Letters, in this Age, have lost, in a great Measure, that Shyness and Bashfulness of Temper, which kept them at a Distance from Mankind; and, at the same Time, That Men of the World are proud of borrowing from Books their most agreeable Topics of Conversation. 'Tis to be hop'd, that this League betwixt the learned and conversible Worlds, which is so happily begun, will be still farther improv'd to their mutual Advantage; and to that End, I know nothing more advantageous than such Essays as these with which I endeavour to entertain the Public. In this View, I cannot but consider myself as a Kind of Resident or Ambassador from the Dominions of Learning to those of Conversation; and shall think it my constant Duty to promote a good Correspondence betwixt these two States, which have so great a Dependence on each other. I shall give Intelligence to the Learned of whatever passes in Company, and shall endeavour to import into Company whatever Commodities I find in my native Country proper for their Use and Entertainment. The Balance of Trade we need not be jealous of, nor will there be any Difficulty to preserve it on both Sides. The Materials of this Commerce must chiefly be furnish'd by Conversation and common Life: The manufacturing of them alone belongs to Learning.--David Hume "Of Essay-Writing"+

I quote from one of Hume's withdrawn essays. I was reminded of this essay by Emily Nacol's An Age of Risk; she makes the important point that Hume "frames this exchange as a risk-free, positive-sum one that issues in profit on both sides, in a metaphor that prefigures the kind of argument he will make about the positive-sum experience of free trade in his essays on commerce." (86-7) Today's digression is a further elucidation of this thought.

The title of Hume's essay may mislead those expecting instruction in writing essays. It's not a how-to, self-help manual of that kind. Rather, the official theme of the essay is to explain the utility or advantageousness of the genre. (I return to that below.) Much of the subtext of the essay is devoted to the explicit shaping of the judgment of his implied audience -- learned and conversable women -- into seeing how worthy his works (and works like it) are. And it is an open question how much of this is servility or (or commercially prudent) flattery, and how much of it is sincere (I return to this below.) This is a stark contrast to the more youthful Hume, who in the "advertisement" to the Treatise where he was more willing to claim that he allowed himself to be instructed by the judgment of his public ("the approbation of the public I consider as the greatest reward of my labours; but am determin'd to regard its judgment, whatever it be, as my best instruction.") Unfortunately "Of Essay-Writing" involves Hume in sexist stereotypes (some of which thinly disguised by attempts at wit), and so one hopes this is the reason why Hume thought it better to withdraw it.

On a different day I would reflect a bit more on how in the nature of a speech act of withdrawing a text in circulation, or not reprinting it in later editions of a text, in the age of printed and electronic publication. Doomed to failure, but, perhaps, not intending to fail. But here I want to focus on three of Hume's very striking claims. 

First, Hume views his essays as a form of what we would call arbitrage between two relatively closed domains: that of specialist learning and that of semi-public conversation (the "learned and conversible Worlds"). And Hume thinks this arbitrage is useful to both domains ("their mutual Advantage"). 

The question Hume leaves hanging is to what degree this arbitrage gives rise to a third domain. Now sometimes arbitrage does not give rise to anything new: it is merely a mechanism to facilitate commerce that would perhaps not happen or occur less efficiently (rapidly, etc.) without the arbitrage. But arbitrage can also generate new products; the instruments that facilitate trade (money, optical fiber cables, mammoth tankers, etc.) may themselves become thriving industries with their own technicians, after all.   

That a third domain is generated by Hume's arbitrage is partially obscured by the fact that in addition to commercial and economic tropes, Hume also uses language of diplomacy (in which he represents himself as an ambassador from the learned). Diplomats are primarily representatives and so it is unnatural to think of them as somehow productive of new kinds. But even Hume notes, explicitly, that diplomates generate treaties and federations ("League, offensive and defensive,") that may take on a life of their own.

So, Hume's essays are not merely arbitrage between other domains, they also are intended to help reinvigorate, perhaps constitute, the domain of what he calls "polite Writing" and Belles Lettres. That he sees his arbitrage activity as more than just facilitation of trade, is clear in that he hopes to shape the judgment of his audience of it. He is not asking his audience to become better judges of the world of learning -- they require his arbitrage for that! -- not better judges of the conversible world (whose criteria are immanent in common life). He does hope, of course, that his arbitrage will improve both domains, so indirectly criteria of judgment in these may be shaped by his activity.

As an aside, as regular readers know I am not un-attracted to the idea of philosophy as a form of intellectual arbitrage. (It's the kind of thing I associate with Liam Kofi Bright's writings bringing together formal tools with topics in fields previously unconnected.) One important difference since the time of Hume's writing is that (recall my musing on synthetic philosophy here; and here with a nod to Lewens) given the fracturing of the learned world into many esoteric domains, intellectual arbitrage can now take place among many specialist sciences as well as among the specialist sciences and the manifest image along many (to use Galison's phrase) trading zones.

So, with the growth of sciences arbitrage opportunities have grown, too. I leave it to a sociologist of science to formulate the law that accounts for the proportion of arbitrage to underlying intellectual developments!* Either way, Hume strikes me as an important role-model for the very possibility of intellectual arbitrage and theorizing about it. In particular, such arbitrage promotes a liberal civilization: one that ends the zero-sum cycle of winners and losers.

Second, Hume makes a striking, easily missed claim about the significance of conversation. It is necessary (can only be acquir'd) for the acquisition of "Liberty and Facility of Thought and Expression." I think Hume is here more radical than one may recognize. It is easy to assume for those shaped by Descartes' meditator, or the recurring image of an arm-chair in a quiet study found in philosophical writing, to assume that what the mind needs to be prepared for genuine ('facility') and independent ('liberty') thinking is a withdrawal from the noisiness of everyday and the stupidity of common sense and public opinion. 

And while Hume certainly allows that some thinking requires silence and withdrawal, the mind gets prepared for this by being socially engaged in discussion with others. We can see recognition of this insight in such institutions as the oxbridge high table, the public seminar, and the social club. Hume would certainly include the coffee house and dinner table in this category. It also follows that for Hume the world of learning is even in an intellectual sense not wholly self-sufficient.

Hume does not quite explain why the mind's emendation toward liberty has to be socially embedded. That's in part because here he does not explain what he means by liberty of thought (a phrase that echoes Cicero, Spinoza, and the freethinkers). Presumably the idea is that in conversation we are practiced in encountering the viewpoints of others on a variety of topics, of listening, and of sharpening our argumentative and rhetorical skills. Hume also seems to think that in conversation we are exposed to more variety of human life/experience. 

I could stop here. But I want to note a third feature. For Hume's claim echoes (recall) an important passage -- which he himself claims is free from "servility and flattery" -- in his dedication (to the tragedian Home) of his Four Dissertations:

Another instance of true liberty, of which antient times can alone afford us an example, is the liberty of thought, which engaged men of letters, however different in their abstract opinions, to maintain a mutual friendship and regard; and never to quarrel about principles, while they agreed in inclinations and manners. Science was often the subject of disputation, never of animosity. Cicero, an academic, addressed his philosophical treatises, sometimes to Brutus, a stoic; sometimes to Atticus, an epicurean.

Liberty of thought is characterized by the possibility of mutual friendship and conversation among those that may differ in ideology (abstract opinions). That is to say, liberty of thought is a virtue in the context of political and theoretical polarization. So, strikingly, the very social institution that make freedom of thought possible (conversation, itself (recall) the grounds of civilization) are also the site of its expression, while simultaneously vulnerable to implosion. 

The pandemic makes the effects of the absence of conversation visible. On a personal level it reduces a sense of connection (see this moving post by Helen de Cruz). But if Hume is right then one of the long-term social casualties of the past year is the absence of a fertilizer of freedom. But, perhaps, if i understand Hume correctly, the writing of essays, to engage in arbitrage, which involves finding the opportunity for mutual gain, presuppose some such liberty of thought and is intended to contribute to it. And so maybe we have others means to encourage it.

 

 

*It's an interesting question to what degree the sociology of finance (e.g., MacKenzie), which is very interested in arbitrage, carries over into the sociology of knowledge.