One of the most amusing passages in philosophy was by a Scottish sceptic:
For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception.
What is expected in any case is not what would be found. Hume never went past looking at perceptions to looking at what it is that looks. Looking at what looks, he might have resolved his dilema and seen clearly that the thinking that thinks about thoughts cvan’t bre understood by the thoughts that are thought. One has to go to the “container” of the thoughts and discover what
that is.
Hume gives no answer to these questions, admitting he is lost for an answer. His phenomenalism has reached a dead end, an impasse which leads nowhere. In the appendix to his Treatise he offered an even more amusing argument:
Suppose the mind to be reduc’d even below the life of an oyster. Suppose it to have only one perception, as of thirst or hunger. Consider it in that situation. Do you conceive any thing but merely that perception? Have you any notion of self or substance? If not, the addition of other perceptions can never give you that notion
ibid. p.676
No, of course not. because in that dynamic one is looking, again, to the objectified perception for the answer to what percieves it as subjecct. Hume, it would appear, from these too brief quotes, or as they are taken, to have never looked past the objectifying function of awareness and not at the subjective itself. He seems to have been a part of the mechanistic approach of his time.
The flaw in his reasoning is obviously the notion that the mind consists solely of perceptions and that there can be a mind with only one perception. Considered by many to be the greatest British philosopher, Hume himself described how he retreated to a game of backgammon to escape from the insoluble problems he created for himself. His reduction of thought to “a little agitation of the brain” led him into a maze of scepticism from which he couldn’t escape. His attacks on the Design argument merely succeeded in making him doubt his own existence and that of everyone else - which is hardly a recipe for successful living! Yet he was the forerunner of much modern British and American philosophy. To reject the primacy of reason is to espouse absurdity even when it is cloaked by impressive-sounding terms like “emergent physicalism” - which simply means obtaining all the wonder, power and beauty of life from nothing more than the specks of dust under our feet…
Yes, but he took his thoughts, objectified, as himself. And the “primacy of reason,” like science, applies in a very specific field, that being the ordering of the divisions of sense perception as presented by the mind. Had he gone past his objectification and identification with his thoughts as himself, he might have arrived at the correct conclusion that there is no reason to Being. He never took himself out of process, and the futitlity of identifying with process bested him, it would seem. In short, he did not go far, deep, inward, or whatever, enough. He would have, as anyone would have, ended with one inevitable perception, if you will, of a non-objectified but totally subjective Nature. But what has that to do with the falacy of “design?”
It’s what they tell me. Nice sentiment. I see no proof, and I’m not even sure it is so by teaching, But I am a baptized RC. I even have the paperwork.