Fascinating article.
Holy shit.But here’s Hume’s really great idea: Ultimately, the metaphysical foundations don’t matter. Experience is enough all by itself. What do you lose when you give up God or “reality” or even “I”? The moon is still just as bright; you can still predict that a falling glass will break, and you can still act to catch it; you can still feel compassion for the suffering of others. Science and work and morality remain intact. Go back to your backgammon game after your skeptical crisis, Hume wrote, and it will be exactly the same game.
The only way the player can be truly happy is to acknowledge the absurdity of the game, and play it anyway! To accept existence as it is and still find joy in it, to become the absurd hero of Candyland!
Interesting in so many ways. Thanks for posting! Having studied many philosophers when I was too young to know what rang true, I now see David Hume as one who, for whatever reasons, went exceptionally deep - his investigations of the self, induction and causation scrape right down to the bare metal of life, the places you come to when deep-running doubt washes your eyes clear. Perhaps his lightness and wit were not unrelated to what he saw there.