The language of sympathy: Hume on communication

Abstract

By placing Hume’s account of communication in the context of some less known seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French resources on rhetoric and language, this essay argues that Hume based his understanding of verbal communication on a model that was rather widespread among his contemporaries. This model construes the capacity to engage with others through language as involving a much more fundamental affective capacity; that is, the capacity to affectively connect with the feelings and thoughts of other persons. Hume discusses this form of affective communication as part of his account of sympathy; and it is here that he provides us with the materials that suggest that the ability to reflect and ‘converse together on … reasonable terms’ (T 3.3.1.15, SBN 581) grows out of our basic affective responsiveness to other persons. With this conception of communication in place, it emerges that, for Hume, sympathy remains central even in his later works, where, as Jacqueline Taylor has recently argued, reflection and public processes of reasoning seem to take over many functions previously assigned to sympathy. This is because for him the capacity for reflective communication is best understood as being constitutively dependent on the unfolding of more basic sympathetic communications.

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