Reductio ad Oozlumity

A reader has alerted me to an essay he published a few years back called The Perils of Philosophy, which touches on the all-too-Humean. Since he's obviously aware of this blog, I'm going to have to give him attribution instead of stealing it outright:

(https://amgreatness.com/2020/05/12/the-perils-of-philosophy/) 

He cites a passage from a novel by C.S. Lewis describing a character who had sailed right through Hume and fallen all the way to the bottom of the cosmos:

He had passed from Hegel into Hume, thence through Pragmatism, and thence through Logical Positivism, and out at last into the complete void.... He had willed with his whole heart that there should be no reality and no truth...

Does the cosmos literally have a bottom? Of course it has a bottom, and speaking of which, does this not remind you of the legendary Oozlum bird -- the one that flies in ever-diminishing circles until it disappears up its bottom? 

But Lewis's character (named Wither) only hit the epistemic bottom. There is also a moral bottom and an aesthetic bottom, but interestingly, Hume in his personal life apparently avoided the latter two. He wasn't an assoul at all, rather,  

Hume was better than his philosophy, and not like Wither at all. He was brilliant and charming, liked and admired by Reid and loved by his good friend Adam Smith.

Go figure. If he had had a rigorously consistent philosophy he would have been an antinomian sociopath. 

Anyway, Curry cites philosopher Thomas Reid's description of Hume's metaphysic, which features

No cause or effects; no substances, material or spiritual; no evidence, even in mathematical demonstration; no liberty or active power; nothing existing in nature, but impressions and ideas following each other, without time, place, or subject.  

Why is this called rational instead of psychotic? Because it is both -- reminiscent of Chesterton's gag that the madman has lost everything but his reason. Instead of a reductio ad absurdum it's an.... expandio there, such that all of reality is rendered absurd. Whatever philosophy is, this must be the very opposite.

Epandio ad absurdum. I want to say that every bad philosophy ends there if only you pursue all its entailments to the end of the line. You may have noticed that they always begin with some principle or axiom that may seem self-evident to the philosopher in question, but is by no means obvious to the restavus. 

Again, such assertions tell us about the fellow asserting them, not about the reality purportedly being asserted. 

If someone tells me that all of reality is exhaustively described by the scientific method, that is not a scientific statement, rather, an autobiographical one, and I even feel a little sorry for him.

Well, not really. It also reminds me of a fruitless debate I had with another guy in the insane asylum. No, we weren't patients, rather, fellow interns from very different programs. He was a behaviorist while my training was in psychoanalysis, thus we were as different as Hume is from Aquinas, except we were both wrong. 

But a strictly consistent behaviorist believes only behavior is real, so the only way to win the debate would have been to hit him over the head with a baseball bat. No bat was handy, so my words just bounced off. 

Naturally, in his "mind," the failure of my words to penetrate his ideological carapace was sufficient proof of the doctrine in question. Which reminds me of how, when my dog barks at the UPS man as he drives away, she must believe she once again saved us from being murdered.

Time out for a passage by Schuon, because it goes to Thomas Reid's characterization of Hume above:

Spirit is Substance, matter is accident: that is to say that matter is but a contingent and transitory modality of the radiation that projects the worlds.... 

If this sounds like a non-Christian emanationism it is, except that Schuon would qualify it to say that God is constrained by his nature -- as Creator, duh -- to create. In other words, he may create this or he may create that, but he just can't help creating. 

You may say Like anyone could know that!, but it makes perfect nonsense to me. It certainly isn't absurd, a point to which we shall return, since it may provide a clue to deeper things. Meanwhile, let's allow the man to finish his thought: the radiation just mentioned

produces the polarization into subject and object: matter is the final point of the descent of the objective pole, sensorial consciousness being the corresponding subjective phenomenon. 

Again, you may find Schuon's description queer, but it is by no means absurd, and the question of course is whether it is queer enough:

For the senses, the object is matter, or let us say the perceptible physical domain; for the Intellect, objective reality is the Spirit in all its forms.

Now, this is just obvious, not esoteric, especially the first part: for what do the senses register? Various modes of physical reality. 

But do the senses know anything about the nonsense world? To ask the question is to answer it. Which is not to go to the other extreme and say that "beauty is in the eye of the beholder." It is, but it is also an adequation to the beautiful. 

Note that Schuon says the Intellect is ordered to an objective reality; we are not arguing for subjectivism, God forbid, for that is a gateway rug to absurdity -- a rug absolutely incapable of tying the cosmos together.

Seems like a good place to pause.