What Was David Hume's Argument That There Is No Such Thing As The Self

Q: What was Hume’s argument for the position that there is no such thing as the self? David Hume was an eighteenth century philosopher from Scotland whose skeptical examinations of religion, ethics, and history made him a controversial eighteenth century figure. Hume, along with John Locke was and empiricist, which means that Hume viewed the sense experience as the primary source of all knowledge and that only a careful attention to sense experience can enable us to understand the world and achieve accurate conclusions. Unlike Locke, Hume did not believe that the self existed based on its dependency on an individuals consciousness of it; instead, Hume believes that if an individual examines their sense experience through introspection, they will find that there is no such thing as the “self” uniting consciousness overtime. In Accordance to David Hume, an individual can bargain with the idea that the ‘self” is just a mere observation of the following two different units, impression and ideas, and how these ideas and impressions associate each other in different ways.

Impressions are active and vivid. Ideas are copies of impressions and because of this, ideas are less active and vivid. These ideas include beliefs and pictures that are constructed up from an individual’s impressions through a variety of relationships, but because they are unoriginal copies of impressions they are once removed from reality. In the 2010 article titled David Hume: Impressions and Ideas, it states “Hume’s ideas associate with each other in three different ways” (Lindsay). Hume believes that an individual’s thoughts are great contributors in making the “self” that an individual desires to claim they have. Among these ideas are resemblance, contiguity of ideas, and cause and effect