Edinburgh University is wrong to erase the flawed genius of David Hume

In response to a students’ petition the University of Edinburgh has decided to remove David Hume’s name from one of its buildings. (Many of us might be happy to see the building itself demolished, but on aesthetic rather than moral grounds.)  Hume was a great figure of the eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment, a philosopher and historian, and by most contemporary accounts a delightful, sociable and humorous man. He is arguably the greatest and most influential philosopher to have written in the English language.

He was a controversial figure in his own time. Edinburgh University denied him a Chair because he was reputed to be an atheist. One might rather call him an agnostic who banished theology from discussions of moral and social conduct. It is not however his views on religion which have got him in trouble today. He is accused of racism because he believed that Black Africans were inferior to Europeans and because Dr Felix Waldmann of Cambridge University has discovered that he “advised his patron Lord Hertford to buy a slave plantation, facilitated the deal and lent £400 to an investor in it.” Moreover when criticised for racism in 1770, he was unmoved.” This is, in today’s terms, quite a charge sheet.

Sir Tom Devine, Scotland’s leading historian, himself a former holder of a Chair in History at Edinburgh, indignantly disapproves of the University’s decision to remove Hume’s name from the building. “In History,” he writes, “we teach our students not to indulge in the intellectual sin of anachronistic judgement – i.e.never to impose the values of today on those of the past”.

In general I agree with Devine. It is wrong – it is even absurd – for the Present to sit in Judgement on the Past. Today it is fashionable to do so, and those who complacently indulge in this practice delighting in their own superior virtue, would do well to reflect that the Future, emboldened by their example, may take an equally dark and hostile view of their own beliefs and practices. The wheel turns. For instance, Abortion which is now legal was criminal not long ago and may be so again some time.

However, there is an element of special pleading in Sir Tom’s argument today (though it is one with which I mostly agree). While it is true that Europeans in the eighteenth century complacently believed in their superiority to Africans and justified the slavery and trade in slaves from which they profited, and that many of the framers of that noble document, the American Declaration of Independence, were themselves slave-owners, there were others like Dr Johnson and John Wesley who thought slavery and the exploitation of slaves wicked and un-Christian, Johnson indeed on at least one occasion proposing a toast “to the next insurrection of negroes in Jamaica.”

Moreover, Hume’s views were, as Dr Waldmann remarks, directly challenged in 1770. The challenger was another Scot, James Beattie, Professor of Moral Philosophy and Logic at the University of Aberdeen.

So, in condemning David Hume for racism, critics today are in the same position as Professor Beattie two hundred and fifty years ago. It’s certainly not a clear-cut case of imposing the values of the Present on the Past.

Nevertheless I remain uneasy, and not only (I think) because I like, admire, and even revere David Hume. What disturbs me is the unwillingness, even refusal, of today’s campaigning zealots to accept the complexity of human nature and character; their eagerness to simplify, their inability to accept that good people may do bad things and have deplorable ideas, or conversely that people with horrible ideas may do good or make a great contribution to politics, culture, and society.

Dr Waldmann himself referred to Richard Wagner, vilely anti-Semitic composer of glorious life-enhancing music. David Lloyd George was an adulterer and financially crooked; he was also the politician who, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, laid the foundation of the Welfare State.

We are none of us all of a piece. We all have prejudices and many of these will be unworthy. It’s better to acknowledge the truth of Immanuel Kant’s words: “out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.” Do those who rush to judgement on the dead ever consider their own imperfection?

Shakespeare has Mark Antony say: “The evil that men do lives after them. The good is oft interred with their bones”. Yet in truth it is in many cases the good which survives to fructify the future. That was the case with David Hume. That is why Edinburgh University should continue to honour his memory and why his statue should remain in the High Street of Edinburgh. Admit his flaws certainly, but recognize his achievement.

And remember that the future will judge us too, and find us failing grievously in many ways.