Notes on Hume’s Treatise

by G. J. Mattey

Book 2
Of the PASSIONS
PART 2
Of love and hatred.

Sect. 1. Of the objects and causes of love and hatred.

1. As with the pair pride/humility, no definition will be given of love/hatred. They are simple impressions, and besides, everyone knows they from experience. The treatment of love/hatred is an abridgment of that given in the last Part of pride/humility.

2. The abridgment is in the object toward which the passion is directed. Whereas pride/humility are directed toward ourselves, love/hatred are directed toward another “sensible being” [which will turn out to be a thinking being].

3. As with pride/humility, the object, the other sensible being, is not the cause of the passion. Such an object would have to produce both opposing passions to the same degree, and they would cancel each other out.

4. The causes are quite diverse, spanning the range from virtue, wit, good sense and good humor, to beauty, force, swiftness and dexterity, to family, possessions clothes, nations and climate. By their different qualities, these all produce love and esteem. Their opposites produce hatred and contempt.

5. The cause involves both a subject and a quality of the subject. A prince owns a palace, and the palace is beautiful. Both of these are required for the production of love of the prince.

6. It is evident that the object of the passions is “some thinking person” and it is probable that their cause is related to that thinking being. Further, it is probable that the cause of the passion of love or hatred is one which itself produces a separate pleasure or pain, respectively. In the case of the prince, the beauty of the palace produces an impression of pleasure. The palace is related to the prince by ownership.

7. Of the two “suppositions,” the requirement that the object producing the passion be related to the object of the passion is “too evident to be contested.” Someone who sees me on the street in front of a palace is not going to love me if he does not connect the palace to me more directly.

8. The second requirement is “not so evident at first sight.” But it can be proved, just as in the analogous case of pride and humility. This proof will have to wait until Hume has converted his reasonings about pride/humility to the case of love/hatred.

9. Hume introduces the passion of “vanity or desire of reputation.” We are vain to the extent that we have the features that would instill pride in ourselves. It would be absurd to base vanity on these features were they not the very things that instill love in others. We are guided here, not by philosophy, but by common experience and what Hume calls a “presentation; which tells us what will operate on others, by what we feel immediately in ourselves.” Because of this close relation between the two pairs of passions, Hume concludes that the arguments that are supposed to show the intimate relation between pleasure/pain and pride/humility also are “applicable with equal evidence” to the proposed causal relation between pleasure/pain and love/hatred.

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