Inquiry into the ends of human action, David Hume tells us, can be taken only so far. “If you push your enquiries farther, and desire a reason why a man hates pain, it is impossible he can ever give any.” But when the sincere philosopher asks himself why he hates pain, the question to him is a serious one, and he may decide there is no reason. When a limb is amputated, the patient often feels pain in the phantom limb for the rest of his life. It is, in fact, only biology that demands we hate pain. The mind is perfectly capable, as every ascetic and flagellant can attest, of overcoming its biological programming,. Hume pays no heed to ascetics and flagellants, perhaps because he perceives them as irrational. But aren’t they in fact more rational than he, having overcome the biological prejudice against pain and risen to a higher level of intellectual autonomy?
Hume admits there is no rational reason for hating pain and loving pleasure, and yet he is unwilling to try to overcome these irrational biological prejudices. Here we see that in Hume’s world common sense prevails over reason, or, better put, common sense defines what it means to be reasonable. The idea that excellence is rare, and can therefore never accord with anything common, whether common beliefs or common tastes, is not one that Hume is willing to entertain.
“The ultimate ends of human action,” says Hume, “can never be accounted for by reason.” For Hume, the ultimate ends of human action are to pursue pleasure and avoid pain. He has reduced man from rational animal to pleasure-loving animal. Should we be surprised, then, that he sees no reason in the aims of a being whom he has stripped in advance of his reason? A rational being strives to know and understand. He accepts pain. He does not fear it. He accepts death. He does not fear it. Hume’s life, like that of the typical bourgeois, is no more than a cowardly quest for comfort and convenience. All heroic sentiments, including the passion to learn and understand, have given way to the petty concern for material comfort.
Hume tries to separate the functions of reason and taste in the human mind, assigning knowledge of truth and falsehood to the realm of reason, and knowledge of beauty and deformity to the realm of taste. But the distinction is untenable. Why does the philosopher seek to learn the truth in the first place? Because he has a taste for it.
For a philosopher, the ultimate ends of human action are knowledge, wisdom, enlightenment, happiness and virtue. These are precisely the same ends any rational being desires, the ends that reason itself, the ens intelligens, desires.
The eternal philosopher, says Wallace Stevens, is the one who remains always on the road from self to God—or more precisely, since the number of ways from self to God is limitless, on one of the many roads. The poem that would be “unimpeachably divine,” Stevens says, is the poem that would allow us to leave behind the faults of animal life. The best philosophy is part of this unimpeachably divine poem. Proto-pragmatist philosophers like Bacon, Locke and Hume want to traverse the road in the other direction, so that philosophy will return to its human limitations and rely on the humble evidence of “the teeth, the throat and the bowels” (Stevens’ expression), and not on the divine will to truth at any price.
Tell a man his desire for wealth and pleasure may be corrupting his reason so he can’t see clearly. He blinks. What’s reason for, if not for the pursuit of wealth and pleasure? In his intellectual life, reason occupies a very humble place. The teeth, the throat and the bowels occupy the places of honor in his kingdom. Reason drudges thanklessly under their whip and sleeps in the servants' quarters. Even those who are exceptionally clever in finding the means to wealth are seldom perplexed by the fact that the end goal to which all their intelligence is directed is precisely the same goal the least intelligent aim at.
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