A Treatise of Human Nature

Next, Hume analyzes another pair of emotions, love and hate. Unlike humility and pride, where the object is the self, the object of love and hate is often someone else, “some thinking person” (380). Hume argues self-love and self-hatred are not true passions since they are never as strong as the actual sensation of hating or loving another person (379). The origins of hate and love are similar to pride and humility. Hume believes there has to be a pleasant or painful impression related to the cause, which is itself related to the idea of the person who is being loved or hated. He then elaborates on his ideas of love and hate by describing eight experiments, which are thought exercises where he thinks about real-world situations.

From these experiments, he forms two conclusions. The first is that an object, not a person, can inspire passions like love and hate as well. However, this requires more than one relation. In one example, Hume writes about traveling in a foreign country with a friend. No matter how pleasant their experiences are, he will not feel any love for the country. However, if it is his or his friend’s home country, then there is an additional relation and Hume is more likely to feel love for the country itself (385). The second conclusion is that we easily go from love and hatred to pride and humility. However, we do not easily go from pride and humility to love and hatred. Specifically, while we might take pride in someone we are close to, we do not usually love someone just because they share some quality we take pride in ourselves. Hume proposes this is because the imagination does not easily go from an idea we strongly relate to, such as our self, to an idea that we less strongly hold, i.e., our idea of another person. Similarly, it is sometimes easy to transfer our love of one person to people related to that person. However, Hume thinks the imagination does not always work this way. In the case of a person loving a father, Hume proposes that the person might not love the father’s children as well. If the children do become near with their presence, then the love for the father will pass to his children more easily (395).

What if someone earns our hatred by hurting or helping us with intention, rather than just causing us pain or pleasure? Hume answers that if someone has a quality that is “constant and inherent in his person and character, it will cause love or hatred independent of the intention” (398). He admits that intention behind a harmful or kind act can increase our emotions about the person behind the act, more so than when the act affecting us was accidental. Still, Hume also writes that we will often irrationally hate someone who caused us pain without intention, like a judge who sentences us for a crime, or someone who defeats us in a competition (399-400).

Hume argues sympathy and the relations of acquaintance and resemblance explain why we sometimes feel hatred or love for someone. We love people simply because they are like us or are related to us. At the same time, Hume adds that we sometimes love people simply because they are wealthy and prominent. He explains this is because we take pleasure from the idea of their luxury and we develop sympathy with their happiness. We also hope that they will share their wealth with us. Likewise, sympathy with the struggles of people who are impoverished can make us uneasy (411). Further, the sympathy that causes people to receive pleasure from admiring a rich man’s wealth also causes that rich man to be pleased by the admiration he is receiving (414).

Next, Hume discusses passions that are formed when one passion is “conjoin’d” (415) with another one. Hume believes that ideas can never completely unify with each other, only be paired up. Meanwhile, passions can be completely blended together to form distinct, new passions. There are passions that can also follow naturally from other passions, like benevolence and anger, which follow from love and hatred, respectively. So strong is this connection, in fact, that Hume argues we cannot love someone without wishing for their happiness (benevolence) or hate someone without wanting them to suffer (anger) (416). Nonetheless, benevolence and anger are distinct passions that follow naturally from hate and love, just as hunger and thirst naturally follow from being starved or deprived of water (416-17).

Hume then addresses compassion or pity. This passion differs from love and hate in that we usually feel them for people whom we do not know and who are different from us. Pity comes out of our sympathy with others or with works of fiction. Hume notes that even if people do not show distress when they experience misfortune, we still share their pain and feel pity for them. In fact, their calm in the face of disaster is likely to inspire even more pity. Also, we tend to have more pity for someone who is murdered in their sleep or when they are just infants than someone who is killed and is able to understand their situation. At the same time, we have no pity but only contempt for people who act foolishly and do not seem to be aware of their own behavior. Hume traces this to how general rules influence our imagination (419).

Hume then turns to malice and envy. Unlike compassion, we tend to feel these passions toward both people we are closely related to and complete strangers. The relation of comparison explains both malice and envy. Malice is when we take pleasure in how the misery of another person compares to our own good fortune. Likewise, envy comes from the pain we feel when we negatively compare our circumstances to those of another. Hume stresses that “we seldom judge of objects from their intrinsic values, but from our notions of them from a comparison with other objects; it follows, that according as we observe a greater or less share of happiness or misery in others, we […] feel a consequent pain or pleasure” (423). Despite this, Hume admits that it is possible to feel malice toward ourselves, either because of a loved one’s own misfortunes or our own guilt. Also, envy depends on a close relation: For example, a successful writer is more likely to be envied by another writer close to their level of success than a low-level hack writer (426).

However, Hume comes across a problem. If pity is painful, then we should hate the objects of our pity, and if malice gives us pleasure, then we should love the targets of our malice. Hume explains this with the relation of “parallel direction” (432), meaning that our own self-interest causes us to feel pleasure in the pleasure and pain in the pain of a close relation, but also pleasure in the pain of a rival. Hume elaborates that there are two types of sympathy when it comes to another’s misfortune. The first is weak sympathy, or “sympathy with uneasiness” (433), which actually does inspire contempt for the subject. For Hume, this explains why we may have pity for the poor while at the same time feeling contempt for them unless their suffering comes across as very great (435). The second is strong sympathy, which encourages compassion and love for the subject.

Next, Hume returns to the idea of combined passions, such as respect and contempt. He defines contempt as a mixture of hatred and pride and respect as a mixture of humility and love. Hume wonders why respect and contempt do not follow love and hate the same way benevolence and anger do. Hume proposes that pride and hatred are associated with what he labels pleasant and magnificent objects, while mean objects encourage humility. By this, Hume means that less “magnificent” characteristics like “good nature” and “generosity” produce “pure love, with but a small mixture of humility and respect” (440).

The other combined passion Hume considers is romantic love. According to Hume, there are three different passions that combine to form romantic love: an appreciation of beauty, lust, and kindness. They combine through a relation of resemblance, since they all share pleasure, and a parallel relation, since all three are based on a desire for the same object (442). Hume argues romantic love most often begins with an appreciation of beauty and leads to lust and kindness. Kindness and lust are too distant from each other to encourage romantic love on their own. Along those lines, Hume describes the appreciation of beauty as a “just medium” (443) between kindness and lust.

Lastly, Hume considers the capacity of animals to feel hatred and love. He agrees that animals can display such emotions, such as the love a dog shows for their owner (444). Like other animal emotions, love and hatred are driven by pleasure or pain or by relations within or between different species. Sympathy also exists between animals, which allows animals to communicate emotions like anger, courage, and grief to each other. Hume argues animals are even capable of envy and malice and basically any emotion “requiring less effort of thought and imagination” (446).