Alan Saunders: The man whom I think was the greatest philosopher ever to write in the English language was born on 7 May 1711. He was part of the Scottish Enlightenment, an extraordinary outburst of intellectual energy in a small, remote and provincial part of northern Europe. More to the point, he set for subsequent philosophers an agenda that they're still working through. His issues are our issues. His name was David Hume and we're celebrating the 300th birthday of this incomparably great man by devoting four editions of The Philosopher's Zone to his life and work.

Hello, I'm Alan Saunders.

[Music] Sonata No 5 in G Major, composer William McGibbon

Alan Saunders: We're beginning with David Hume the man and his life and times. And I'm delighted to be joined by his most recent biographer, Roderick Graham, author of The Great Infidel: A Life of David Hume. He, like Hume, is a Scot and he joins us now from Edinburgh. Roderick, welcome to The Philosopher's Zone.

Roderick Graham: Thank you very much, I'm glad to be here.

Alan Saunders: Let's begin at the beginning. What was Hume's background, and how was he brought up and educated?

Roderick Graham: His father was a lawyer in Edinburgh. In fact he was born less than a mile from where I'm speaking now. Although he was a lawyer, he was also a farmer, he farmed sheep down in the Scottish Borders, and he was a comparatively wealthy man. Hume was educated at the family farm where he would have been brought up by a private tutor, probably a clergyman. So he'd have been brought up very much inside the Christian faith of the 18th century before going to university.

He went to university at the age of 12. He found himself at the university in a time of great intellectual change in Scotland. People were starting to question everything, and people were questioning more and more the dogma that had been given out by the church in the previous century. So there was a lot of ferment, a lot of debate, a lot of clubs, a lot of drinking. He never graduated.

His father died, he had to move back to the farm where he set about educating himself in philosophy. He set about the equivalent of clearing his mind out with something like caustic soda to start again from scratch.

Alan Saunders: Did he read the great philosophers of the day, even just do it from scratch?

Roderick Graham: He certainly read the great philosophers of the past. Most importantly I think, he read a man called Pierre Bayle who wrote a book called The Critical History, and Critical History really founded the whole school of scepticism. But Hume read it, and it undoubtedly laid the foundations for his scepticism, for his rejecting all the accepted dogmas and all the accepted teachings, and starting again from scratch. And that is a mighty thing to undertake even if you are a PhD student at a university.

If you're alone in a farmhouse, with a brother and sister and mother, father is dead, the only person who's not earning and you're indulging yourself in studying and creating a philosophy all of your own, Hume suffered guilt all his life from the fact that he was supported by his family while he earned absolutely nothing at all.

Alan Saunders: One of the points that you make in your book is that this challenging of the established philosophy and the established religion of the time, did come at something of an emotional cost to him, didn't it? He suffered.

Roderick Graham: Oh yes, not only emotional but a physical cost. I mean he had a full-blown nervous breakdown, we would say today. A local doctor smiled and said, 'You have acquired the disease of the learned', something unknown to us really. He suffered from scurvy, he got spots and blisters on his hands, he over-salivated, he had violent headaches. He was recommended drinking a pint of claret a day and taking exercise, which he did by riding. He was losing weight and once he started on the claret wine, and once he started riding, he start to put on weight again, but he did drive himself into a physical and mental corner, and fought his way out of it again, and realised then that he had to do something really crucial with everything that he'd gained. He was already making notes for the treatise, which he finally wrote.

Alan Saunders: Well yes, the treatise. This is his great work, A Treatise of Human Nature which he wrote at the age of 26, an amazingly early age. It was published in 1739 and the significant thing about it seems to be that it discusses the importance, not just of reason, which philosophers know all about, but also of experience.

Roderick Graham: That's true. I mean in lots of ways he was moving on from Locke.

Alan Saunders: The 17th century English philosopher.

Roderick Graham: Absolutely right. Who basically said 'We know nothing except from our own experience. Our thoughts give us nothing unless we've had an experience beforehand.' Hume moved on from there, and said that in fact acting on our experience is how we should control our lives. If you chuck a brick at a window, the window shatters; if you get a brick which is absolutely identical and a window which is absolutely identical and chuck it at the window, experience tells you the window will shatter, but you can't prove it. It's not provable in actual philosophy. So you can rely on nothing except your experience.

Alan Saunders: And the style in which he writes is very striking, isn't it? I certainly find it very attractive. You say that it's the style of one who is talking, rather than expounding.

Roderick Graham: Yes, I think that's true. It's a very attractive style, it makes it very easy to read except that I keep wanting to interrupt him and say 'Can we go back a bit there David?' But it is a very easy book to read because of this rather chatty style.

Alan Saunders: I'm really interested that you say that you want to say 'Can we go back a bit, David?' because you want to think of him as 'David', don't you? I mean it's very personal and you do feel drawn to him as a person, even as you read his most abstract philosophical works.

Roderick Graham: Yes. One of the great things that I would love to have done would be to spend an evening with David Hume, probably more than anybody else. I doubt, in fact if my liver could stand it. This was the 18th century, they were monumental drinkers, and Hume was no laggard in putting the glass down empty.

Alan Saunders: Now Hume said that the treatise, which as I said was he wrote at the age of 26, and was published in 1739, he said that it fell 'dead-born from the press.' Was its reception really that bad?

Roderick Graham: No. Nothing like that. He had nearly killed himself, he'd produced what he regarded as an absolutely groundbreaking work of philosophy, and he imagined that the morning after it was published, he would be on every chat-show, on every television station in the world; he would be instantly world-famous. Of course he wasn't. This depressed him greatly. In fact there's a letter from a friend of his writing after the event saying at the time the treatise was published in Edinburgh it was the talking point of every dinner party in town. It was a slow burner; it became famous in Europe, then it became famous in Britain, but it wasn't the instant best-seller that Hume hoped it would be.

[Music] Sonata No 5 in G Major, composer William McGibbon

Alan Saunders: On ABC Radio National you're listening to The Philosopher's Zone and I'm talking to Roderick Graham, author of The Great Infidel: A Life of David Hume. And David Hume is the person that over the next few programs we're going to be celebrating—he's 300 years old this year.

Roderick, a couple of times in his life, he did try to get academic positions. He tried to get university chairs, and it didn't go well, did it?

Roderick Graham: No. The first major one was the chair of philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. Unfortunately, one of the duties of the professor was to give a weekly lecture, proving the existence of God. How Hume ever thought he would get round that, I have no idea. But he was far too dangerous in his thinking, he was appointed as librarian to the Faculty of Advocates. This was a marvellous opportunity because it gave him—and these were days when there weren't public libraries—it gave him access to one of the great libraries of Britain for absolutely nothing.

He adorned this position, becoming one of the great librarians. Unfortunately, ordering three books from France, which the Committee took one look at and thought, 'They're French, they must be filthy', and immediately insisted that he remove them. He became very cross about this. He didn't actually resign, what he did, and this was very typical of the man, he gave his position over to a blind poet who was penniless, and had no money at all, he was a down-and-out poet.

Alan Saunders: I think giving your job to a blind poet is really rather sweet.

Roderick Graham: I think it's wonderful.

Alan Saunders: Yes. Now his second great philosophical work, An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, was published in 1748. Now what was the object of that book, given that he thought that The Treatise of Human Nature, which has been published in 1739, had done so badly—was this just a way of selling the same message in a more agreeable form?

Roderick Graham: Yes, it was twofold. I think he was clarifying it for the reader. Certainly if people read that one first and then the Inquiry, they'd find the Inquiry a lot easier. He was also clarifying it in his own mind because he'd said all he had to say on that subject. How did he leave it alone? Well a way to do that is to write the definitive work, so he wrote basically a restatement of the Treatise in different terms.

Alan Saunders: And he also at this time turned his attention, notoriously, to the question of miracles.

Roderick Graham: Ah. Yes. He'd actually been thinking about miracles since he'd been in Paris in 1734, where there were a lot of miracles going on. His view of miracles was very simple: a miracle must be absolutely impossible in reality, otherwise it's not a miracle, it's just an event. If it's impossible, the only way you can believe it is if you have faith. And the acceptance of faith and the deliverance of faith into a person is a miracle, and since you can't believe in a miracle, there you go round and round in a circle. Miracles need faith, and faith needs miracles. Since faith cannot exist without miracles and miracles cannot exist without faith, the whole business is absurd.

Alan Saunders: He then becomes a historian, and he wrote a history of Great Britain. Was that, do you think, because he believed that he'd said all he had to say about philosophy?

Roderick Graham: More or less. In the pure terms of philosophy, yes, I think he did. History books were becoming fashionable. The obvious thing for Hume to write would of course have been a history of Scotland. Unfortunately, a friend of his, Robertson, was writing a history of Scotland; Hume knew this. It was a logical extension from his writing of essays. This was immensely popular and it was from this moment on that David Hume became a very rich man indeed.

Alan Saunders: And he was—I mean he was an extremely good historian but as you say, Robertson was writing a history of Scotland, Hume's writing what he calls a history of Great Britain, but he's writing a history of Great Britain from a bias that's essentially (for a Scotsman) is essentially English, isn't it?

Roderick Graham: Yes, it is a very dangerous subject. I'm a Scot, I went to school in Edinburgh, I went to university in Edinburgh, and when I went to school, we learned history. The history we learned was the history of England, and when the history of England touched Scotland, in other words, when England declared war on Scotland, or invaded, or when the Scots invaded England, then we got a bit of Scots history. But otherwise, you got the history of England. England having this bizarre idea that it actually represented Britain, which it doesn't. But politics to one side, Hume was writing in England, he knew that the history of Scotland was going to appear, so all he could do would be to fill in the gaps in Britain—and the gap in Britain, if you are a Scot, is England. So he wrote the history of Britain, but it was focused on the affairs of England.

Alan Saunders: Now in this era of his life, he goes to France and he has an utterly bizarre relationship with a really, really trying man, the great French or Swiss-French philosopher, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. What was going on there?

Roderick Graham: It was Hume being kind. When he was in France, he became known as Le Bon David, he was the toast of the fashionable salons. Somebody said, 'I think I've died. I've only seen David Hume twice today.' He was the guest of most of the philosophe, all of whom more or less without exception were aristocrats. They were also atheists, they were both atheists but validated the human mind. The person that was excluded from all this, and the most revolutionary thinker was Rousseau. He was excluded because he insisted that his mistress, who was an illiterate maidservant, accompanied him everywhere, along with his dog which was vast and foul, and so he was not acceptable in company.

His writing was also rather too dangerous. He was the only one of the philosophes that saw a revolution coming. Hume saw it. But the other ones that he met, d'Alembert and Diderot, they didn't see a revolution just around the corner. Rousseau was in more or less permanent exile, and so Hume arranged for him to come to London, be his guest, he arranged for meetings, he arranged for Rousseau to have an audience with the King, to live in some comfort and be able to write.

Rousseau, being one of the greatest pains in the world, immediately turned on Hume and accused him of all sorts of outrageous things, and they had violent rows, which Hume tried to calm down and pour oil on very troubled waters, but there was no pouring oil on Jean-Jacques Rousseau; if he wanted a row, he was going to have a row. And the correspondence between them is the most celebrated correspondence of a row ever, with Rousseau just being wildly ungrateful.

Hume had arranged for him to go to a theatre and meet the King and at the very last moment, Rousseau said, 'I can't leave the house because the dog would be alone.' So he had to get a dog-sitter for this man. Although he respected very much what Rousseau was writing about, and Rousseau's whole idea of a social contract Hume thought was admirable, but Rousseau the man, no, he was monstrous, absolutely monstrous.

Alan Saunders: I think that the story of David Hume's death is in a way heroic. Tell us about his passing.

Roderick Graham: He died in Edinburgh. He was now very wealthy. He had been huge, he'd been enormously fat. As I say, he was very fond of the table. But he was, by the end, suffering, and losing weight, and now we can look back on what was wrong with him and say almost certainly he had cancer of the liver. He tried various cures, he went to Bath, he went to see physicians in London, and he went to see physicians in Edinburgh, and there was absolutely no cure whatsoever. He also had a ruptured upper intestinal tract, as far as we know; it's very difficult diagnosing something which was in conversational terms and 300 years old. But he died among his friends, and among his books, which were very important to him.

He himself said, 'I am dying as swiftly as my enemies would pray for and as comfortably as my friends would expect.' In other words, I think he was up to his eyes on laudanum. He died in his house in Edinburgh; again it's within a few hundred yards of where I'm speaking. My story that when his coffin was leaving the house to go to the burial ground, somebody in the crowd shouted out, 'Ye ken he was an atheist!' which he wasn't. And somebody in the crowd shouted out, 'Yes, but ye ken he was honest!' And that's an epitaph.

Alan Saunders: Indeed, and the reason I described his death as heroic is he wouldn't take any comfort, he wouldn't delude himself, would he, about another world to which he was going. In fact, he was so stoical that Samuel Johnson refused to believe the story of his death, and James Boswell, Johnson's biographer, was so far from being able to stand it, that he would visit Hume on his deathbed and would then go out and have sex with prostitutes, just to sort of affirm the life force.

Roderick Graham: Well, Boswell was very good at affirming the life-force. It affirmed itself battering many times. It was Boswell who gave him the name of The Great Infidel, because he said he went to visit Hume and he found this charming, cultivated, entertaining man sitting, having a glass of wine and reading his books, and he said it was difficult to realise he was in the company of The Great Infidel.

Hume knew that he had books as yet unpublished, in fact a dialogue on natural religion, which was going to be even more—controversial is hardly the word—it was going to be a very shocking book, because he was going to look at the question of is there a God. He'd been accused of being an atheist all his life, he always said he wasn't an atheist, but he never said he believed in God. And he knew that there were these posthumous books that would probably be published and cause a great row. A lady friend of his—and Hume had a lot of lady friends, although he never married—said 'Oh David, you'd better burn all your wee books', but he refused to do that, and he allowed them to be published after his death where they did indeed cause the row that he thought they would.

Alan Saunders: And you think he wasn't an atheist?

Roderick Graham: He didn't think there was any proof that God did not exist, and if there is no proof, you cannot accept this as a fact. He was amazed when he met all those aristocratic revolutionaries in Paris, and they said, 'We're all atheists'. There were 12 of them at the table I think, and Hume said, 'It's the first time I've met so many people who had such a firm belief.' He found that being an atheist was almost as bigoted as saying 'I'm a devout Christian.'

Alan Saunders: Just finally, I've been to Edinburgh, I've seen the statue there, a fairly recent statue of David Hume, in a rather fetching, off-the-shoulder toga. How important do you think it is to our understanding of Hume that he was Scottish?

Roderick Graham: I don't think it's that important at all. It wasn't that important to Hume. Really, he would have liked to have spent his life in a provincial university town in France, provided it had an excellent library and probably a very good tailor. He found Edinburgh close, narrow, he found London barbaric, he found Paris too fashionable, he would want his own town. The fact that he was Scottish, that he lived in Scotland at the time which he did, I think provided the ground for doubt, provided the ground for scepticism, and provided the ground for the growth of his thought and philosophy.

Alan Saunders: Well, it's a life and a body of work hugely worth celebrating, and part of that celebration is the book The Great Infidel: A Life of David Hume by Roderick Graham. Details of that on our website. I've been talking to Roderick Graham. Roderick, thank you very much indeed for being with us.

Roderick Graham: Not at all, it was a great pleasure indeed. Thank you.

Roderick Graham: And that website is also the place to go if you want to share with us your thoughts about Hume and his philosophy. It's also where you can find out what's coming up in our Hume season. We'll be looking at what he had to say about morality and where he stood on God, immortality and miracles.

Next week, Hume on causation. You think you can tell when one thing causes another? Hume wasn't so sure.

The Philosopher's Zone is produced by Kerry Stewart and the sound engineer is Davy Hume's fellow Scot, Charlie McCune. I'm Alan Saunders and I'll be back next week with more of the intellectual treasure that is the thought of David Hume.