Hume was a product of the late Baroque period, so clarity and brevity were absent from his intellectual toolkit. The most confounding of these barriers are Hume’s Baroque style and his outdated methods of inquiry. Despite the fact that science has validated many of Hume’s core ideas, there are still lots of barriers that make it difficult for a 21st-century mind to grok Hume’s 18th-century philosophy. His brilliance is easy to miss, though, especially for a modern reader. From time to time, the text would open to me like an unfurling flower, or an exquisite sunrise glimpsed after an unreasonably early tumble out of bed.Įventually, I came to a predictable conclusion: David Hume was brilliant. Slowly, mysteriously, sentences and paragraphs began congealing into coherent expressions. My experience improved as I pressed on, however. Early on, my attempts felt futile––understanding occluded by my intellectual limitations and relative lack of outside support. From the first page, it plunged me into a fervid mode of double-layered analysis in which my struggle to comprehend the text was mirrored by efforts to track my personal reactions to whatever content I was able to wrest from it. David Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature is not a breezy book.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |