An Empiricism of Common Life

Nor need we fear that this philosophy, while it endeavors to limit our enquiries to common life, should ever undermine the reasonings of common life, and carry its doubts so far as to destroy all action, as well as speculation. Nature will always maintain her rights, and prevail in the end over any abstract reasoning whatsoever. Though we should conclude, for instance, as in the foregoing section, that, in all reasonings from experience, there is a step taken by the mind which is not supported by any argument or process of the understanding [i.e. from cause to effect]; there is no danger that these reasonings, on which almost all knowledge depends, will ever be affected by such a discovery.

Enquiries, Selby-Bigge edition, Oxford, 1902, 1972, p. 41.

This is a good quote from Hume, and I think this statement actually holds for anything that philosophers ever come up with. That is why, as I argued earlier, nothing can be controversial after you have argued for it, otherwise you still have more argument to provide. If philosophers have proven anything, it is that they are as trustworthy as lawyers on any subject whatsoever. They can with airtight cogency argue for the most preposterous conclusions from the most banal of premises. It is all delightful entertainment, but if something they have said sounds suspicious to you, it probably is, and don't you believe it!

But there also seems no reason to me why common life should not also provide negative feedback for philosophical views themselves. Normal human beings simply cannot be expected to take seriously such skeptical conceptions of the rational and of rational life as worth living up to. Yet philosophers just continue to produce philosophical views that result in such conceptions. To me there seems something pointless about this, although the type of person who becomes an academic philosopher is, I think, also the type of person who doesn't care about practice. Furthermore, the kind of person who does care about practice is not likely to become an academic philosopher, any more than I did myself! Hence, academic philosophy simply drifts further and further out of touch with reality. I think it was very much this tendency that G.E. Moore was trying to combat with his appeals to Common Sense.

In insisting that concepts must correspond to sense impressions, Hume was adopting a very narrow kind of empiricism. But once we accept that all observations are theory-laden anyway, it is possible to accept quite a different kind of empiricism. "Common life", as Hume states it, is not in danger from his enquiries, because "Nature will always maintain her rights, and prevail in the end over any abstract reasoning whatsoever." Indeed, it was this tendency in ethics that so appalled me that I was prepared to leave philosophy over the matter. And yet, "common life" is something that is clearly observable by some robust empiricism. Why, then, can we not have an empiricism of common life, which takes "nature", and seeks to explain the principles behind her, rather than work at odds with her, safe in the knowledge that she will always prevail anyway? As they say in common parlance, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em! In my opinion, common life is the primary empirical reality, a fact that is consistent with my observations from early childhood before I learned of theories of science, and my adulthood in learning the theories of philosophy. To devise first principles of an empiricism of common life would be a very worthy philosophical goal indeed. As to whether it is necessary for me to undertake such a venture now, I do not know, for only time will tell what next will capture my imagination. At this stage, I am still content to explore the proceedings of the Friesian school to see how they deal with the epistemological issues concerning ethics.