Subjective Empiricism and Organization: Deleuze on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature

The status of the subject or ego has long been and remains a key issue in contemporary social theory: how is the subject organized in relation to a world? This is the question addressed in Deleuze’s (1991) study of Hume. Or rather the question of the question is addressed, as Deleuze is less interested in subjectivity than in how subjectivity came to be construed as a philosophical problem. First published in 1953, Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature was Deleuze’s first book. Hume’s fundamental question is this: how does mind become human nature? His approach to the question is quite different from the Kantian and Hegelian transcendentalism which came to dominate the question in European thought. Hume was an empiricist in the Hobbesian mould; for him philosophy begins with the sensual body of experience. Hume begins by asking what is given to experience, and how the subject of experience is organized in the given. His answers to these questions are (briefly) that what is given is mind, and what proceeds from the given is human nature. How, then, is human nature organized from mind? How is the subject, the subject of passion, thought and action, embodied from the given? Hume argues that the elements and forces constituting the subject are supra-human. This transfers the question of human organization onto a field of impersonal forces, an approach congruent with Gehlen’s view of natural, pre-cultural Man (technically a paradox) as the-not-yet-human.