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PARTISAN REVIEW
to allay the philosopher's anxiety, and that all anxiety is to some extent
moral anxiety. Common idiom, as so often, points to the feeling reality
which philosophical language may disguise. We commonly talk about
being "anxious to know" something. Comparatively recently, some phi–
losophers, particularly Professor Wisdom, have drawn attention to the
oddness of philosophizing, that some expressions of philosophical scep–
ticism are curiously akin to
folie de doute;
while Wittgenstein said that
he philosophized to remove a
feeling
of puzzlement. What the philoso–
pher may have observed, however fleetingly, is that the sceptical posi–
tion is radical: there is no system of
thinking
which will cure the
feeling
of uncertainty, because that is an immediate intuition of our human
condition. But having made this observation, if indeed they have, most
of them go ahead and start looking for the watertight system, the
proof
that there can be nothing certain. I believe that, probably alone among
modern philosophers, Hume really grasped this radical opposition be–
tween thinking and feeling. Certainly he grasped that a total addiction
to philosophy was destructive-and deliberately repaired to the back–
gammon table and to general conviviality. It is worthy of note that his
brand of ethics was a descriptive account of the Passions, and that it
allowed for tolerable self-assertion; its values were not purely negative
or masochistic: pride could be proper. He also made it clear that there
was no logical way in which you could get from the descriptive to the
hortative, from the "is" to the "ought", no way in which my maxims
can be made logically binding on you.
Marxism claims that "philosophers have hitherto only interpreted
the world; the problem now is to change it." But all ideologies are an
attempt to change the world, or the people living in it, or both; and all
systematic philosophies tend to become ideologies
in
this sense.
Will
you
walk into my parlor--or be damned? The ordinary person resists the
ideological treatment imposed by others, and Hume was ordinary or
"normal" because he resisted his own. The normal mind-by which I
mean the human mind preoccupied with doing its best to enjoy life from
day to day-withdraws from abstract ideas as a jellyfish does from a
stick, because of their compulsive nature, because they imply that you
ought
to do something, if it is only to try and understand them.
It
may
be true that in the situation we have got ourselves into, it would be
better if more people could be given a rational fright, could be made,
for instance, to feel that they "ought" to do something about the threat
of planetary extinction. But humanists-who are almost by definition
concerned about the probable fate of the world-must bear
in
mind
that nothing is less convincing than a rational argument, not because
