Philosophising & Living

In a remarkably warm and relatable passage, David Hume famously ends his Treatise Of Human Nature by offering some reflections on how and whether his scepticism ought to reflect itself in his ordinary life. He relates the experience of intellectually dismantling all the implicit beliefs of ordinary life, only to subsequently go out and live that life. What he finds is that his slightest engagement with the simple pleasures of sharing a world with others is enough to wash away the obscurities of abstract reasoning and philosophical theorising:

But what have I here said, that reflections very refin'd and metaphysical have little or no influence upon us? This opinion I can scarce forbear retracting, and condemning from my present feeling and experience. The intense view of these manifold contradictions and imperfections in human reason has so wrought upon me, and heated my brain, that I am ready to reject all belief and reasoning, and can look upon no opinion even as more probable or likely than another. Where am I, or what? From what causes do I derive my existence, and to what condition shall I return? Whose favour shall I court, and whose anger must I dread? What beings surround me? and on whom have I any influence, or who have any influence on me? I am confounded with all these questions, and begin to fancy myself in the most deplorable condition imaginable, inviron'd with the deepest darkness, and utterly depriv'd of the use of every member and faculty.

Most fortunately it happens, that since reason is incapable of dispelling these clouds, nature herself suffices to that purpose, and cures me of this philosophical melancholy and delirium, either by relaxing this bent of mind, or by some avocation, and lively impression of my senses, which obliterate all these chimeras. I dine, I play a game of back-gammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends; and when after three or four hour's amusement, I wou'd return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strain'd, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any farther.

Years later, Walt Whitman writes a poem called Of The Terrible Doubt of Appearances, which is one of my favourites of his. He, too, first relates the terrible uncertainty of the world, the staggering imperfection of our knowledge of the things around us, and the outstanding questions of metaphysics, only to rejoice in the concrete and vivid experience of a life lived with others:

Of The Terrible Doubt Of Appearances

Of the terrible doubt of appearances,

Of the uncertainty after all, that we may be deluded,

That may-be reliance and hope are but speculations after all,

That may-be identity beyond the grave is a beautiful fable only,

May-be the things I perceive, the animals, plants, men, hills,

    shining and flowing waters,

The skies of day and night, colors, densities, forms, may-be these

    are (as doubtless they are) only apparitions, and the real

    something has yet to be known,

(How often they dart out of themselves as if to confound me and

    mock me!

How often I think neither I know, nor any man knows, aught of

them,)

May-be seeming to me what they are (as doubtless they indeed

    but seem) as from my present point of view, and might

    prove (as of course they would) nought of what they

    appear, or nought anyhow, from entirely changed points

    of view;

To me these and the like of these are curiously answer'd by my

    lovers, my dear friends,

When he whom I love travels with me or sits a long while holding

    me by the hand,

When the subtle air, the impalpable, the sense that words and

    reason hold not, surround us and pervade us,

Then I am charged with untold and untellable wisdom, I am

    silent, I require nothing further,

I cannot answer the question of appearances or that of identity

    beyond the grave,

But I walk or sit indifferent, I am satisfied,

He ahold of my hand has completely satisfied me.

And finally, later again, Simone de Beauvoir writes, in the conclusion to her book The Ethics of Ambiguity, of a similar sentiment, though from a different direction. de Beauvoir begins from the moral certainty of a universal rationalistic Hegelian metaphysics but finds that its teleological inevitability, just like the groundless undermining of the scepticism considered by Whitman and endorsed by Hume, also falls short of life. She writes:

It is the assertion of our finiteness which doubtless gives the doctrine which we have just evoked its austerity and, in some eyes, its sadness. As soon as one considers a system abstractly and theoretically, one puts himself, in effect, on the plane of the universal, thus, of the infinite. That is why reading the Hegelian system is so comforting. I remember having experienced a great feeling of calm on reading Hegel in the impersonal framework of the Bibliotheque Nationale in August 1940. But once I got into the street again, into my life, out of the system, beneath a real sky, the system was no longer of any use to me: what it had offered me, under a show of the infinite, was the consolations of death; and I again wanted to live in the midst of living men...Regardless of the staggering dimensions of the world about us, the density of our ignorance, the risks of catastrophes to come, and our individual weakness within the immense collectivity, the fact remains that we are absolutely free today if we choose to will our existence in its finiteness, a finiteness which is open on the infinite. And in fact, any man who has known real loves, real revolts, real desires, and real will knows quite well that he has no need of any outside guarantee to be sure of his goals; their certitude comes from his own drive.

I suppose one lesson, in taking some of these threads together, is: no matter what one believes to be the actual metaphysical constitution of the world, no matter what one thinks our epistemic relationship to platonic forms is, no matter how insistent physicists are that there is no meaning and no time, no matter how naively people insist on cleaving the world into multiple realms, there really is a world out there that we all share, in experience. And this lifeworld is relatively well-defined, but evolves according to a logic that is perpetually generative, shifting, and internal to itself. It is made up of people, common-sense, cooperation, joint ventures, ideals, goodness, suffering, cruelty, responsibility, love, loss, friendship, joy—all the familiar mores of life. And it is within this world that our life takes place and we negotiate our place within it. It is therefore this world that we cannot ignore. We must immerse ourselves in it and we must do so, with all sincerity. This is what these authors, in spite of their profound difference in ultimate aim, understood.