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 saying. And they would often say things like, this may make sense to you, but it makes no sense whatsoever to me. With the implication being: I’m the reasonable person, and you’re either a crackpot, or coming from some weird vector that I’m not going to entertain, or just not advanced enough in the study of philosophy. So I am the standard, so to speak. And you failed to meet the criterion, which is that what you’re saying could actually, with some difficulty, make sense to me. There’s many different variations on this.

And now why shouldn’t we take it for granted that people who do seem smarter than ourselves . . . I mean after all Hume has a whole book that he’s written, and many of us don’t. We’re intruding into his book, so to speak, and checking out the topics that he has given much thought to and decided to weigh in on, kind of like guests or interlopers. Maybe we’ve written a book, but it’s not exactly on what Hume is talking about, so we’re in a lower position.

That may be one model for how we understand what engaging another philosopher looks like, but that’s only one model out of many possibilities. The great irony is that Hume himself is somebody, like many philosophers, who has a great capacity to think about possibilities otherwise and raise them when he’s discussing other people’s contentions about things. And yet, in some areas, like whether or not we have a self, he simply can’t conceive of anything that would answer to what people have called the self.

And this is so common, not just in modern philosophy, but in late modern philosophy and even in earlier engagements in philosophy. So I think this is something well worth dwelling on. Again, we shouldn’t just dismiss any sort of first-person , “I understand” or “I don’t understand” claims out of hand. But we also shouldn’t automatically take them as if they are the last word on the topic. And perhaps they should lead us to, on occasion, speculate about: well, why doesn’t this person see things as possibly being otherwise?

And maybe another exercise, we could ask ourselves: what if they could see it as otherwise, this particular matter, and how would that fit into the rest of whatever system or structure or works and bundles of ideas that they have? That could be an interesting exercise on our own part to create a sort of dialogue within the philosopher’s works and thought.

So this has taken us pretty far afield, but I thought it could be an interesting set of reflections spurred by some of the people I’m currently studying and the approach that they take towards possibility, and conceivability or intelligibility.

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