Episode 54 - The Limits Of Philosophers' Conceptions Or Imaginations

As I was rereading a portion of David Hume’s Treatise on Human nature to prepare some video and podcast episodes for a class that I’m currently teaching, I ran across some passages that, I won’t attribute entirely to Hume because that would be quite silly, but I’m going to unpack using Hume, because he provides a great example of something that we might call a philosophical vice or misstep or error.

So what is this? I guess if we had to come up with a phrase for it so that we could easily identify instances, it would be thinking that your own capacity to imagine, or understand, or grasp something, is the final word on whether other human beings can do this or not.

The particular discussion that I have in mind is where Hume assures us that there is no such thing as a self in any real sense, that it’s really a fiction and a bundle of perceptions. And he’s got an argument for this, which is that if we seek inside of ourselves (notice that we can’t get away from the word entirely, but that’s not a big problem), we never find an impression that corresponds to the idea of the self.

So we can conceptualize or imagine a self, but we can never find any origin-point or evidence, or anything that we can look at and say “Aha! Here it is. And Hume explains this in a good bit of detail.

A bit later, he will say that there may be somebody who will nonetheless claim that they do indeed have a self and that they are aware of their self. And Hume says: listen, I just can’t get what they’re saying. And I don’t think that they actually get what they’re saying either. Now I’m paraphrasing him. I’m not reading directly from the text, but that’s essentially what he’s saying.

And I’m reminded another text that I’ve been doing work on recently, againbecause I’m teaching it in a class, Thomas Nagel’s What Is It Like to Be a Bat, where he insists in a pretty absolute way that there’s no way any of us human beings can possibly by use of our faculties, imagine or conceptualize what the subjective experience of being a bat would possibly be like, and yet nonetheless it does make sense to talk about facts having to do with bad-perceptions or bat experience.

So other people have pointed out to Nagel: Well, maybe we actually aren’t all as limited in our imaginative capacities as you’re claiming that we are. And it is kind of weird that somebody would indeed make such a universal claim for all human beings based on their own, we’ll say, experience. And I don’t just mean perceptual experience. I mean the experience of using our minds to think about things.

So if I can’t think of it, or I can’t conceive of it, or I can’t wrap my head around it, it therefore is nonsensical, or impossible, or pick whatever other adjective that you like. And to me, this isn’t something to condemn entirely because maybe there are cases where we do try to think things out and we realize that they’re absurd or they just can’t be the case.

How do we tell whether we’re on to something? We ask other people: Hey, how does this work for you? Can you wrap your head around it? And maybe they say that they can, but then they can’t adequately explain it to us, and we suspect that maybe they’re engaging in magical or wishful thinking, or just not thinking things through well enough.

So I’m not condemning or dismissing this out of hand altogether, but I do think we ought to be a little bit suspicious when a philosopher or somebody who’s philosophizing but isn’t actually a philosopher maybe even more the case when they say: Yeah, this simply can’t be, because I cannot make sense of it.

I’m reminded of a rhetorical technique that was used by analytic philosophers, at least when I was coming up in graduate school. They would give you kind of a confused look, when you would try to say something to them, make some sort of claim or advance an idea or an argument.

And here’s the catchphrase. They would say: I’m sure I have no idea what you’re talking about. Or: I simply can’t understand what you’re say