More Mr Nice Guy
Posted: Sun Nov 03, 2013 12:51 am
I always loved that bit about deciding to do whatever was deep-down important to you....I read about this controversy much later, as a result of fretting about what I should do with my life. I didn’t want to waste it, in case (as still seems likely) it turned out that we only get the one. I couldn’t see how to be sure to use it wisely unless I knew what it was for, so I reckoned I’d better try to puzzle out its purpose. What exactly is any human life for? Is it for expanding scientific knowledge? For helping the suffering? For raising children? For making as much money as possible? For becoming the world paintball champion? So I became very interested in the whole notion of purpose and of whether you can derive a knowledge of anything’s purpose simply from the facts about it, but I kept coming up against Hume’s wretched ‘is’ and ‘ought’. What ought you to do with your life? Nothing about how the world is can possibly tell you. At least, rightly or wrongly, that was how I read Hume and I thought that Hume was correct. There is no objective ‘purpose of life’ to find – only projects we ourselves freely choose. So I decided to just do whatever felt deep-down important to me personally. This turned out to be starting a magazine to popularise philosophy and share my meta-ethical confusion with a wider public. Cheers Dave.
None of the controversies David Hume provoked have been definitely settled, and who is to say that his writings won’t generate further philosophical disputes in the future? We could and perhaps should be in for much more trouble from Mr Nice Guy.
Congratulations on achieving your dreams.
