Anatomist and painter: Hume's struggles as a sentimental stylist

Frazer, M. (2016) Anatomist and painter: Hume's struggles as a sentimental stylist. In: Kerr, H., Lemmings, D. and Phiddian, R. (eds.) Passions, Sympathy and Print Culture: Public Opinion and Emotional Authenticity in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Series: Palgrave Studies in the History of Emotions. Palgrave Macmillan: London, pp. 223-241. ISBN 9781137455406 (doi: 10.1057/9781137455413)

Abstract

When David Hume wrote to Baron de Montesquieu ‘J’ai consacré ma vie à la philosophie et aux belles-lettres’, he was not describing himself as having two separate callings. His was a single vocation — one involving the expression of deep thought through beautiful writing. This vocation did not come naturally or easily to Hume. He struggled continually to reshape his approach to prose, famously renouncing the Treatise of Human Nature as a literary failure and radically revising the presentation of his philosophy in the Essays and two Enquiries. This essay will focus on Hume’s struggle between two modes of moral-philosophical composition prevalent in his day: the cold, unemotional style associated with experimental science that Hume metaphorically labels anatomy’ and the warm, rhetorical style which he labels ‘painting’.

• Item Type: Book Sections
• Additional Information: Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions Change Program Collaboratory ; Conference date: 18-09-2012 Through 19-09-2012
• Keywords: David Hume, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, moral sentiments
• Status: Published
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Frazer, Dr Michael
• Authors: Frazer, M.
• College/School: College of Social Sciences > School of Social and Political Sciences > Politics
• Journal Name: Passions, Sympathy and Print Culture
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• ISBN: 9781137455406