Decoding the Sunrise Title: David Hume’s Other Lesson

More than a reference to a literal sunrise on reaping day, Collins’ brilliant title manages to tap into one of the most famous philosophical arguments from the Enlightenment Era. While the lion’s share of attention probably focuses on Scottish philosopher David Hume’s concept of implicit submission, the key to the book’s title is found in a much briefer quote — also by Hume – placed subtly at the bottom of the novel’s epigraph (page of quotes). As quoted by Collins, Hume offers, “That the sun will not rise tomorrow is no less intelligible a proposition, and implies no more contradiction, than the affirmation, that it will rise.” Aside from decoding his eighteenth-century prose, some additional context around his isolated quote would be immensely helpful. Collins apparently agrees. She granted one of her rare interviews with Scholastic’s David Levithan to help explain the title, released just prior to the novel’s publication date. At the forefront of their substantial back-and-forth conversation was the book’s title and her personal inspiration for choosing it. She first recalls her initial encounter with Hume and his writings:

My dad introduced me to David Hume when I was a child, along with many other philosophers. He talked about them while using more kid-friendly examples. Like, in Hume’s case, sunrises and billiard balls. It was a little mind-bending but always interesting.

Suzanne Collins, Scholastic Interview

The first thing to note is the return of Collins’ father as an immensely influential figure in her life. She has previously indicated that he served as a vital source of inspiration and knowledge around the military and warfare tactics she infused into the original series and beyond. Along with her three older siblings, Suzanne had grown up with a career Air Force officer who had served in both the Korean and Vietnam wars. A grandfather and numerous uncles had served earlier in both world wars, providing further insights and knowledge about America’s war history and philosophy. Her particular passion for teaching Just War Theory is now well known from earlier interviews, having placed it as a central theme underpinning the original trilogy.  

In the case of her latest prequel, Collins is pulling more from her father’s teachings in philosophy and political science (he had earned a Ph.D. in the latter), now with her own primary focus on the work of David Hume. In one respect she is passing on her father’s lessons in her own creative ways, now through untold millions of readers. It is also reasonable to suggest that, had Collins’ father not shared Hume’s lessons of “sunrises and billiard balls” as she passingly noted in her interview, we would not likely be reading a prequel titled Sunrise on the Reaping.

To best comprehend Hume’s profound contribution to the title, we should first back up to compare inductive versus deductive reasoning, just as Collins does within her interview. (I ask that you bear with me here, as this distinction provides the fundamental inspiration for the title.) In brief, deductive reasoning takes our flow of logic from general principles to the specific. Also referred to as deduction, the goal is to make use of general principles or premises to draw specific conclusions. For example, if the general premise is known to be true – such as, “all dogs have four legs,” then we can reasonably conclude that the poodle featured in the Heavensbee mansion portrait should have four legs as well.

Collins provides her own example of deductive reasoning, further describing it as “top-down logic.” She continues to explain, “It works from the general to the specific. Like, ‘All human beings need oxygen to survive. I am a human being. I need oxygen to survive.’ If your premise is true, then your conclusion is correct.” Her last point here is vital, in that the original premise needs to be accurate. Alternatively, we could begin with the premise that all older men with curly, gray hair are dictators. Should I also have curly, gray hair, we could logically deduce that I am a dictator as well, which is, quite happily, false. The untrue premise leads us to an equally false conclusion about my own preferred governing style.

This brings us to inductive reasoning, or logically moving from the specific to the general. The logic of induction, or inference, relies upon any number of isolated and limited observations in the empirical (real) world to draw more general conclusions. This is more of a bottom-up approach to generate new premises or hypotheses, whereas deductive reasoning is more top-down. In the worlds of social or physical sciences, there is typically a “constant interplay” between inductive and deductive reasoning which hopefully leads researchers “steadily closer to a truth that can be verified with certainty.” (Lanese, LiveScience)

The catch with inductive reasoning is that it depends on the completeness, or total number, of observations. One simple example involves an opaque bag of coins. Someone pulls five coins from the bag, all of which are pennies. We might then logically infer that the sixth coin pulled from the bag will also be a penny. Although all the initial observations produced pennies, however, we cannot rely on inductive reasoning to conclude that the next coin will necessarily be a penny as well. It could easily be a nickel or anything else. However, since the strength of the inference is based on the completeness of the observations, we could try, say, fifty observations rather than five. If all fifty attempts produce pennies, we could make a stronger inference through inductive reasoning that the next coin will likewise be a penny. In turn, we could even form an initial conclusion that all the coins in the bag are pennies, thereby moving logically from specific observations to a general premise. But should we interpret this conclusion as new knowledge that can be steadfastly relied upon in the future? David Hume would say “no, not in the least.” To do so would be faulty reasoning. And Lenore Dove would agree, as we will see.

Hume wrote extensively about what is now referred to as the “problem of induction.” By forming inductive conclusions based on isolated, past experiences, he posited, we fall into the trap of “the future will resemble the past” principle. In the case of the bag of coins, numerous observations were made, and all the extracted coins turned out to be pennies. Inductive logic would therefore have us predict that future extractions will resemble the past – that is, the next coin to be pulled will also be a penny. But Hume would ask us, “How do you know?” To assume that the future will resemble the past is just that – an assumption – not a conclusion, and certainly not “new knowledge” about the bag of coins. Based on his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), Hume teaches that a skeptical response is more appropriate to such inductive arguments. All we can truthfully conclude about the bag of coins is that “We don’t know.” For Hume, we should withhold conclusions based on assumptions about the future. All we have to base them on is our observations of the past. (Brissey, Philosophy Now)

Collins teaches us similarly, stating that “inductive reasoning goes from the specific to the general. ‘My cat Zorro loves yogurt. Your cat Fluffy loves yogurt. Therefore, all cats love yogurt.’ But do they? Your conclusion might be considered probable if you witnessed a bunch of other cats loving yogurt, but it’s not a certainty.” (Collins, Scholastic) Again, we simply do not know, nor can we definitively conclude, that all cats love yogurt. In a nutshell, this dilemma describes the “problem of induction.” That is, to form a definitive conclusion about something, it is necessary to first understand the “foundation” of the inference, or logic, that the inference is based upon. The “problem,” however, rests in Hume’s argument that it is impossible to do so. We cannot accurately draw conclusive inferences about the future by observing the past.

It is this fundamental inductive fallacy around which Collins wraps her entire second prequel. She reiterates Hume’s question within her interview, asking if the sun is “guaranteed to rise tomorrow morning? David Hume would say no. If you say yes, you’re using faulty inductive reasoning. Just because the sun rose yesterday and it rose this morning, there’s no guarantee it will rise tomorrow… You can say you feel it’s highly probable that it will rise tomorrow based on your observations, but that’s as certain as you can get.” Beyond this rather academic argument, she does acknowledge that people still reasonably plan out their lives by making such inferences from the past. Hume would agree as well, as he does not dispute in his writings that humans regularly make inferences. We must do so to navigate through our day-to-day lives in predictable, largely reliable ways.

This all should help us better understand the Hume quote provided in the epigraph, and why Collins chose it: “That the sun will not rise tomorrow is no less intelligible a proposition, and implies no more contradiction, than the affirmation, that it will rise.” He is basically saying that it is equally reasonable to propose that the sun will either rise, or not rise, the next day. This is because there is no definitive way to absolutely know one way or another based entirely on what has been observed in the past.

For her part, Lenore Dove goes “full Hume” on Haymitch, with him struggling to keep up. She says, “And that’s part of our trouble. Thinking things are inevitable. Not believing change is possible.” Poor Haymitch still isn’t quite understanding her own reasoning, she correctly surmises, so she launches into one of Hume’s most fundamental arguments related to the “future will resemble the past” principle:

Think about it. You’re saying, ‘Today is my birthday, and there’s a reaping. Last year on my birthday, there was also a reaping. So every year, there will be a reaping on my birthday. But you have no way of knowing that. I mean, the reaping didn’t even exist until fifty years ago. Give me one good reason why it should keep happening just because it’s your birthday.

Lenore Dove (SOR 11)

She is essentially applying Hume’s faulty inductive reasoning argument. Just because Haymitch had experienced a reaping on all sixteen birthdays, that does not guarantee one will also take place the following year. This leads into Collins’ second fundamental idea from David Hume, that of implicit submission (see this post). As narrator, Haymitch reflects on Lenore Dove’s optimism, telling us, “while it’s a fine idea, thinking about a world with no reaping, I don’t really see it happening. The Capitol has all the power and that’s that.” (SOR 11) At this point he does not yet believe change is possible and is still inclined to “submit implicitly” to the authority and the will of the Capitol.

With all of this, we might (finally) better comprehend the subtle though powerful meaning behind the book’s title. Collins – through Lenore Dove – is applying Hume’s previous sunrise example to the reaping itself. She demonstrates how relatively fragile the Hunger Games and their associated reapings really are. As we understand today, the sun’s daily appearance has been occurring for billions of years, making it one of humanity’s surest bets that Wyatt could possibly make. And yet, due to inductive reasoning, the past does not guarantee the future, since we cannot know with absolute certainty what will happen the next day.

If this is true with respect to sunrises, then something like the 50-year-old reaping ceremony is much less certain. By the second Quarter Quell, we only have fifty past cases of the reaping from which to form an inductive assumption about the future. What, then, is Lenore Dove’s moral to her story? The bottom line is that Haymitch should not view the annual reaping as unshakable. Change can happen, and she urges Haymitch to at least imagine that change is possible. Otherwise, Hume’s implicit submission kicks in and people simply accept the Games as inevitable. Collins sums up her title this way:

That’s where the title came from. Sunrise on the Reaping. Lenore Dove’s convinced it’s not a certainty. She can imagine a world without it. The future can be different than the past. She makes Haymitch promise that he will fight to make sure there is never another sunrise on the reaping. It becomes his dramatic goal, his mission, and his reason for living. But it takes many years to achieve.

Suzanne Collins, Scholastic Interview

Collins has consequently devised a brilliant title for a masterful story, itself built around one of the most significant philosophical arguments from the Enlightenment. Rather than referencing the literal sunrise on reaping day, the title represents no less than a call to action from Lenore Dove to imagine and strive for a brighter future. And unbeknownst to her, the Capitol’s Plutarch Heavensbee is already thinking through potential approaches to accomplish just that. He ultimately picks up where Lenore Dove leaves off, at the other end of Haymitch’s train ride to the Capitol. As we learn later in Sunrise, Plutarch is cunning enough to play the long game (see this post), and he and Beetee both cajole Haymitch into playing along with their seditious plans. Between their questionable scheming and Lenore Dove’s promise, Haymitch’s inner rebelliousness remains just bright enough to eventually help spark one Katniss Everdeen to success. Moreover, he would ultimately stay alive to realize his promise and tell his story.

Source of Feature Image: Charles Leon, “Will the Sun Rise Tomorrow?”