Hume distrusted literature and worked to discredit character sketches as legitimate forms of philosophy

It is hard to find a philosopher who writes well. One can list the good stylists on one hand: Bernard Williams, for the clear frankness of his prose; Stanley Cavell, whose writing self-reflectively folds in on itself like origami; Friedrich Nietzsche, whose dazzle and exclamation seduce many people into questionable ideas. David Hume is typically seen as part of this crowd. The 18th-century Scottish philosopher wrote in many genres: not only essays, dissertations and treatises, but dialogues, impersonated monologues and biographies. Hume adored the literary celebrities of his day, like the essayist Joseph Addison, who founded The Spectator magazine, and the French moralist Jean de La Bruyère. He was also unfailingly committed to finding a way to bridge the divide between scholars and society, between a world that was ‘learned’ and one that was ‘conversible’. However, it was Hume who helped to divide what we now call ‘literature’ from what we now call ‘philosophy’. He did so by posing a devastating challenge to the prestige of one literary tool that had long been considered a legitimate method in which to practise philosophy: the character sketch.

What is a character sketch? It is a short description of a person, a social type, which focuses on their habitual preferences and behaviours. Imagine describing a type of person: an incel, an intellectual, a mansplainer. You might start by saying that they are ‘the kind of person who…’ The incel is a kind of person who lives in their parents’ basement, who knows the latest memes, and who politically probably leans far Right, or at least libertarian. The intellectual is the kind of person who likes good coffee shops, reads high-brow magazines, and who politically finds themselves leaning liberal, or far Left. The mansplainer, to borrow the journalist Marin Cogan’s memorable expression, is the kind of person who has a ‘need to explain to you – with the overly simplistic, patient tone of an elementary school teacher – really obvious shit you already knew.’

The character sketch is a genre that is descriptive by nature, and that today reads as a little sociological, a little literary, and more than a little comic. While a part of our everyday discourse, this genre has a long history, stretching all the way back to ancient Greece. Over the course of this history, the character sketch became entangled with another discipline entirely: moral philosophy, the branch of philosophy concerned with virtues and vices, with thinking about social customs and mores, and altogether with trying to work out what it takes to become good. For hundreds of years, the character sketch was understood as a standard method of practising this form of philosophy – until Hume challenged this assumption in 1748. With this, philosophy and literature started to split.

The ancient Greek thinker who should be credited with establishing this curious form of writing is a little-known philosopher called Theophrastus, who sits within the canon of great philosophical stylists. His name, given to him late in life by his teacher Aristotle, means ‘divine speaker’. (He was formerly called Euphrastus or ‘good speaker’ but then he got upgraded.) Theophrastus directed his writerly talents to a dizzying range of topics. He wrote treatises on juice, as well as works of metaphysics, logic and politics. He is most renowned, however, for two things: inventing the science of botany, and writing a very short book that came to be known as the Characters.

The Characters is a collection that sets out to define 30 vices. It does so by writing sketches of types who embody these qualities. In the Characters, Theophrastus considers vices like Bad Timing, Absentmindedness, and Idle Chatter, and then shows them in action. The Man with Bad Timing, for example, is someone who always chooses the wrong moment. He ‘is the sort who goes up to someone who is busy and asks his advice,’ who ‘sings love songs to his girlfriend when she has a fever,’ who, ‘when a man has just returned from a long journey,’ invites him to go for a walk. The Absentminded man is similarly maladroit. He is the sort of person who, when he’s in the audience at the theatre, ‘falls asleep and is left behind alone.’

The Characters was a ‘guide’ to understanding what kind of people you should frequent and what kind to avoid

As these examples hint, Theophrastus is not interested in glamorous vices, vices that make tragedies, vices that present clear problems like Envy or Lust. The qualities he depicts are linked together by the special quality of being ordinary: these are social sins that we commit at the scale of the everyday. Theophrastus’ vices are not only everyday, but they are explored without an eye to explanation. At no point does Theophrastus indicate why the Man with Bad Timing behaves as he does. These sketches are works of description alone.

Theophrastus’ short work, with its interest in describing ordinary kinds of ineptitude, has long puzzled classicists, who have battled over why Theophrastus wrote it. Was this a work of rhetoric, helping young lawyers work out how to mock defendants in court? Was it an appendix to the Poetics, listing comic characters, as opposed to the tragic characters favoured by Aristotle? Or was it a work of ethics: exposing a set of bad qualities one should keep in check, when living among other people? The first person to attempt to answer this question was an anonymous Roman writer, who decided to write a spurious preface to the text in Theophrastus’ name. The Characters, the preface claims, has two ambitions. It is an exercise in classifying and describing people, in the same way that Theophrastus had previously classified plants. And, it is a work with a significant ethical intention. The Characters should be used as a ‘guide’, this preface says, to understanding what kind of people you should frequent, and what kind you should avoid.

This preface launched a moral reading of the Characters, which proved incredibly popular in the Renaissance.

In a European intellectual society racing to recover ancient manuscripts, and to use ancient wisdom to solve modern problems, Theophrastus’ Characters was a big hit. After it was first translated into Latin in the 1430s (by an Italian man who was looking to impress a Paduan Papal chamberlain), humanist after humanist rushed in to offer new and improved Latin translations, complete with explanations of what they thought this work could teach.

This first man, the Italian Lapo da Castiglionchio the Younger, promised that Theophrastus’ Characters was the perfect work for someone looking to learn how to ‘control’ other people. The Papal chamberlain, he nudged, could learn from Theophrastus how to recognise other people’s vices, and therefore how to better address them. The Characters, in his view, would be a good guide to Vatican management. The Viennese humanist Johannes Gremper felt that Theophrastus’ ancient collection had similar public interest. When addressing his edition to an ambassador to the king of Hungary and Bohemia, he framed the Characters as a treasure trove of ‘practical experience’ that could be of great professional use. The German patron Willibald Pirckheimer made the even more remarkable case that, in the wake of the German Peasants’ War in 1525, the Characters provided the key to quelling the revolting masses. By learning about vicious characters, the masses would see what kinds of actions to avoid. Theophrastus, Pirckheimer suggested, offered a kind of moral instruction by bad example that was more likely to succeed in its ambitious task of ethical reform, where other attempts had failed, because it was singularly well written.

Character-writing was the third and ‘most elegant’ way that the ancients had of instructing morals

Theophrastus’ collection had somehow become a work of public importance. Again and again, throughout the 16th century, European intellectuals thought this short work capable of both revealing the nature of other people, and of helping people reform themselves. Short descriptions of ancient social types, like the Absentminded Man and the Man with Bad Timing, suddenly found themselves projected into urgent and contemporary political crises. By the end of the 16th century, after multiple new translations and editions of the Characters had been published, Isaac Casaubon, a brilliant French philologist, tried to make sense of the nature of the powerful appeal of Theophrastus’ 30 types.

Casaubon was an astonishing scholar of ancient languages – intimately familiar with ancient Greek, and a learner of Aramaic, Syriac, Arabic and Hebrew. Casaubon was famed across 16th-century Europe: he held professorships at Geneva and Montpellier, worked at the royal library in Paris, and then in the court of the English king. He was also obsessed with the Characters. For more than 20 years, Casaubon worked on translating this short work into Latin. His efforts resulted in three extraordinary editions of the Characters, in which Casaubon attempted to explain the interest and value of character-writing as a genre.

In Casaubon’s words, character-writing was the third and ‘most elegant’ way that the ancients had of instructing morals, along with reasoned arguments and general advice. What is special about character-writing, Casaubon argues, is how it proposes to teach ethics by describing how a person typically acts who is endowed with a particular quality. Through a character sketch, a reader would not learn that being absentminded was a bad quality through a set of arguments, nor would they simply absorb a piece of general advice about the need to avoid absentminded actions. Instead, they would see the quality of absentmindedness embodied in a particular person, via a vivid description of their daily habits. For Casaubon, character-writing therefore stood as an ‘intermediate genre between the writings of philosophers and poets’. It instructed morals like philosophy, but it was as vivid as poetry. This was a kind of writing that was both ethical and literary in nature.

Casaubon’s idea that character-writing was a third method of writing philosophy proved highly influential in the century that followed – until it came to be challenged by Hume.

In 1608, the English bishop Joseph Hall decided to bring character-writing into English. He thought that Theophrastus’ ancient Greek text could be transformed into a work of Christian morality, if a few judicious tweaks were made. In came virtuous types like the Humble Man and the Faithful Man, and figures of new vices, like Envy and Covetousness. Hall worked on his adaptation after closely reading Casaubon.

In Hall’s words, while the ancient Greeks shared some things with 17th-century religious authorities, they differed in how the ancients taught their ‘naturall Divinitie’ ‘not after one manner’ but ‘with manie expositions’. The three ways that the Greek moral philosophers used to instruct morality, Hall says, following Casaubon, were: discussions about how to collectively achieve human happiness; the application of general moral principles to specific situations; and the writing of characters of virtue and vice. This final art of ‘Charactery’ consisted in ‘drawing out’ each virtue and vice: a process of depicting embodied qualities, rather than discussing abstract notions. As a result of these ‘lively’ descriptions, vivid character sketches would teach the reader how to recognise virtues and vices when they encountered them in real life.

Eighty years later, the vernacular character sketch made its way into French. Its most masterful craftsman was the moralist Jean de La Bruyère, who wrote a bestselling edition of the Characters which combined a new translation of Theophrastus with a modern adaptation. Just like Casaubon and Hall before him, La Bruyère considered these character sketches as a third way of writing moral philosophy.

The poor man ‘blows his Nose under his Hat, he spits in his Handkerchief, he gets into a corner to sneeze’

‘What probability is there to please all the so different tastes of Men, by one single Tract of Morality?’ La Bruyère asks. Some people, he says, want a systematic approach to moral philosophy. They are drawn to an elaborate moral system like Aristotle’s. Others want something more scientific. They are drawn instead to René Descartes. A third type of reader, however, is not interested in tabulating moral traits, nor in locating their physiological origin. Instead, they wish to see their embodiment in people. By seeing these figures, such readers hope to learn how to ‘distinguish the good from the bad, and to discover what is vain, weak and ridiculous, from what is good, solid and commendable.’

La Bruyère placed himself in this final category. His collection does not only sketch virtues and vices, but describes social types, like tax collectors, lawyers, divines, atheists, the rich and the poor. The rich man, as La Bruyère paints him, is someone who ‘extends his Handkerchief, he puts it to his Nose, he blows hard enough for all to hear him, he spits about the Room, and sneezes aloud.’ The poor man, in contrast, ‘blows his Nose under his Hat, he spits in his Handkerchief, he gets into a corner to sneeze.’ These types, for La Bruyère, are also part of moral philosophy – even though they are replete with sociological detail.

More than 50 years later, having read La Bruyère, David Hume disqualified character-writing as the third method of writing moral philosophy.

In An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), Hume divided contemporary moral philosophy into two factions. In his view, its two dominant methods were the ‘easy and obvious’ and the ‘accurate and abstract’. By framing the contemporary philosophical scene in this way, Hume threw down the gauntlet. This broke with the tradition of typically seeing character-writing as an alternative, third approach.

The easy-and-obvious manner, Hume explains, works from the idea that we are creatures guided by taste and sentiment. Easy-and-obvious philosophers are accordingly careful to ‘paint’ virtue in ‘the most amiable Colours’, by borrowing from ‘Poetry and Eloquence’. The result is an imaginative and rhetorical method of writing about ethics, designed to achieve vividness and pleasure. The work of these philosophers further involves selecting ‘the most striking Observations and Instances from common Life’ and placing ‘opposite Characters in a proper Contrast’.

Much of this description overlaps with character-writing. This is not surprising, as Hume would have found character-writing all around him. Character sketches permeated the classical authors that were the basis of his education. Greek and Latin editions of the Characters were newly published in Glasgow in 1743 and 1748. And Hume even owned a copy of Casaubon’s edition of Theophrastus. This link between the easy-and-obvious philosophy and character-writing becomes most evident, however, when Hume decides to list the names of philosophers who are its representatives. He does this in a startling phrase:

The Fame of Cicero flourishes at present; but that of Aristotle is utterly decay’d. La Bruyere passes the Seas, and still encreases in Renown: But the Glory of Malebranche is confin’d to his own Nation and to his own Age. And Addison, perhaps, will be read with Pleasure, when Locke shall be entirely forgotten.

In this argument, Hume counterposes a trio of Cicero, La Bruyère and Addison, who represent the easy philosophy. He contrasts them with Aristotle, the French rationalist philosopher Nicolas Malebranche and John Locke, who represent the accurate-and-abstract philosophy.

The easy-and-obvious character-writers are excellent stylists but they do not quite get to the bottom of things

Uniting the former group is an interest in character types. The Roman rhetorician Cicero was accredited with developing the rhetorical technique of notatio, or character delineation; La Bruyère had written his bestselling adaptation of Theophrastus; and Addison’s publication, The Spectator, often incorporated many descriptions of character types, including that of Mr Spectator himself. As one historian has written, Addison’s ‘method of choice was the Theophrastan character sketch.’ If the world currently prefers the easy-and-obvious manner of writing philosophy, as Hume thinks, the world then currently prefers character-writing.

The contrast Hume draws between the easy-and-obvious trio, and that of Aristotle, Malebranche and Locke, serves as an introduction to the other species of philosophy: the accurate and abstract. This other species of philosophy sees the human being differently. It endeavours to form ‘Understanding’ more than to cultivate ‘Manners’. Accurate-and-abstract philosophers are interested in determining the guiding principles behind our customs, as opposed to describing them. They do so by proceeding from ‘particular Instances to general Principles’, and remain dissatisfied until ‘they arrive at those original Principles, by which, in every Science, all human Curiosity must be bounded.’ If the easy-and-obvious philosophers are likened to character-writers, these philosophers are likened to metaphysicians instead.

For Hume, neither method of philosophy is quite right. The easy-and-obvious character-writers are excellent stylists and highly readable writers, but they do not quite get to the bottom of things. The accurate-and-abstract metaphysicians, though closer to finding the truth, end up abstruse and overly technical, and sometimes stray into speculation. The best kind of philosophy, Hume thought, should combine the best parts of each one. ‘Happy,’ he concludes, ‘if we can unite the Boundaries of the different Species of Philosophy, by reconciling profound Enquiry, with Clearness, and Truth with Novelty!’

Hume hoped that his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding could achieve this stylistic union. He would do this by taking ‘Clearness’ and ‘Novelty’ from the easy-and-obvious philosophy, and ‘profound Enquiry’ and ‘Truth’ from the accurate-and-abstract. He would write the Enquiry in a readable manner, but would nonetheless use it to discover general principles. Hume uses a metaphor to clinch the nature of his combined method. The ‘inward Search or Enquiry’ of the accurate-and-abstract philosopher, Hume writes, is as necessary to the easy-and-obvious philosopher as anatomy is necessary to the painter. If the painter is concerned with appearances, using ‘the richest Colours’ to depict ‘Figures’ with ‘engaging Airs’, they must also direct their attention to all that lies beneath: the obscure ‘inward Structure of the human Body’, complete with its much less picturesque bones, muscles and organs. Hume will similarly try to discern the inward structure of the mind – obscure as it may be – and then write about it, with all the rhetorical paint he has available. To ensure he does not become entangled with superstition, he will further set experience as a boundary: refusing to philosophise over what he has not lived through.

With his own reconciliation of these two styles, Hume moves away from both the representation of characters of virtue and vice, and from speculative metaphysics. For Hume, character sketches were therefore no longer a third alternative path to moral philosophy, but one of two doxas to be overcome by his new synthesised method. In Hume’s hands, moral philosophy becomes instead a rhetorically masterful search for the underlying general and universal principles of diverse phenomena, which acknowledges its limitations. If Hume is going to deal with characters, he will do so in this fashion.

Indeed, when Hume wrote his notorious essay ‘Of National Characters’ that same year, he did not sketch characters of the French Man or the Italian Man in the style of Theophrastus and his imitators. Rather, he began with critiquing an existing principle, commonly used to determine national character. Hume’s essay is not concerned with representing particular attributes, but with better determining exactly how national character emerges. In other words, Hume is interested in the principle that forms national characters in the first place; not with describing national characters themselves.

In the dialogue affixed to Hume’s Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751), we find a speaker so concerned about the ‘Uncertainty of all these Judgments concerning Characters’ that they are encouraged to try to find ‘a Standard for Judgments of this Nature’ by ‘examining the first Principles’. Hume uses an image to express the nature of this problem:

The Rhine flows North, the Rhone South; yet both spring from the same Mountain, and are also actuated, in their opposite Directions, by the same Principle of Gravity: The different Inclinations of the Ground, on which they run, cause all the Difference of their Courses.

This image might serve well to illustrate two methods of writing that would follow two different courses in the decades after Hume’s separation of moral philosophers into learned, abstruse anatomists who search for the secret springs and principles of reality, and easy, conversational, shallow painters who represent characters. While both have their source in the mountain of moral philosophy and both, in their own ways, are actuated by an attempt to grasp reality, they follow two very different courses, eventually discharging in seas that we now respectively call ‘philosophy’ and ‘literature’. While, from the perspective of the sea, we cannot see the single spring of these two rivers, by training our eyes on Hume, we get somewhere close to the source.

What would it be to think of Joseph Addison as being of as much moral importance as John Locke?

Hume’s Enquiry, as one literary historian puts it, was written ‘at a transitional moment in the history of the concept of literature itself’. ‘Literature’ came to name all that the painterly kind of philosophy had once encompassed. Literature was a hub for typical figures, lively description and the placing of ‘opposite characters in proper contrast.’ In some cases, individual Theophrastan figures that were first written for 17th-century collections of characters ended up being directly absorbed into novels. In others, this influence was less direct and consisted more of novelists exploring moral qualities – like pride and prejudice, or sense and sensibility – through the description of typical figures, now placed in a narrative structure. Philosophy came to be anatomy instead. Turning to the syllabi of current philosophy departments, it is clear that Hume won the day: today, in a philosophy course, you are not going to be reading Addison but Locke.

By looking back before Hume, we can catch a glimpse of an alternative, more literary mode of philosophy – one that existed before a commitment to general principles foreclosed it. In it we find a version of knowledge that is social and contextual, and one in which the aesthetic and the cognitive are inseparably linked. What would it be, this tradition encourages us to ask, to think of La Bruyère as being as much a philosopher as Descartes? Or of Addison as being of as much moral importance as Locke? What would we be able to do if we took our everyday descriptions of mansplainers, incels and intellectuals as being literary tools with the power to help us understand the world and change our own behaviour?

Here are two suggestions. The erstwhile connection between character-writing and philosophy encourages us to consider how, sometimes, to explain a general concept like ‘bad timing’ or ‘absentmindedness’, you do not only need a definition and an explanation, but a description too. This tradition shows us that, sometimes, it is only through a faithful, vivid description of a particular kind of person that a given general concept can be grasped. We need the Absentminded Man, in other words, to understand what Absentmindedness is.

On this view, certain kinds of literary writing become more philosophical in spirit. So too, do certain literary characters, often those that philosophers have typically neglected. The Theophrastan tradition does not encourage us to think about the philosophical value of an Antigone, or an Anna Karenina, with their rich inner lives and hard decisions to make, but prompts us to pay attention to the many unnamed types that populate fiction. With the Theophrastan tradition in mind, we see how more ordinary social figures – hosts, snobs, coachmen, aunts – are the particular embodiments of general concepts.

Secondly, remembering the link between philosophy and character sketches helps us see how, when we describe more explicitly moral types, like hoarders or mansplainers, we are actually engaging in a longstanding tradition of providing moral instruction via bad example. By naming these types, we encourage people not to act similarly. In the 16th century, the sketch of the Man with Bad Timing was thought to work as a deterrent, to encourage people not to behave like him. In the 21st, we call someone a mansplainer in the hope, likewise, that eventually he will stop being one. This emphasis on transformation distinguishes the Theophrastan sketch from the stereotype. The qualities it treats are not essential traits that are imagined to be inextricably bound to someone’s religion, ethnicity or race. Rather, they are qualities we name in the hope of changing them.

In a world in which philosophy is now all about anatomy, the Theophrastan tradition prompts us to reconsider the moral and political work of painting: both as a route to knowledge, and as a call to action. Recalling the fortuna of this short book of sketches – how it was once read and understood, and how it went on to be imitated – allows us to expect more of the intersection between philosophy and literature than good style. The Theophrastan tradition shows us how a seemingly innocuous and neglected aspect of literature holds within it a route to accessing general concepts, and to modifying the way we behave: two tasks that are eminently philosophical and that usually require a lot more than a short sketch.