Philosophy - Hume

from: David Hume -The School of Life Articles | Formerly The Book of Life

Hume’s philosophy is built around a single powerful observation: that the key thing we need to get right in life is feeling rather than rationality. It sounds like an odd conclusion. Normally we assume that what we need to do is train our minds to be as rational as possible: to be devoted to evidence and logical reasoning and committed to preventing our feelings from getting in the way. 

But Hume insisted that, whatever we may aim for, ‘reason is the slave of passion.’ We are more motivated by our feelings than by any of the comparatively feeble results of analysis and logic.

...for Hume, a human is just another kind of animal.

We find an idea nice or threatening and on that basis alone declare it true or false. Reason only comes in later to support the original attitude.  

...he firmly believed in the education of the passions. People have to learn to be more benevolent, more patient, more at ease with themselves and less afraid of others. But to be taught these things, they need an education system that addresses feelings rather than reason.

“When I enter most intimately into what I call myself,” he famously explained, “I always stumble on some particular perception or other... I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception.” Hume concluded that we aren’t really the neat definable people reason tells us that we are and that we seem to be when we look at ourselves in the mirror or casually use the grand misleading word I, we are “nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.”

The test of a belief isn’t its provable truth, but its utility.

He argued that morality isn’t about having moral ideas, it’s about having been trained, from an early age, in the art of decency through the emotions. Being good means getting into good habits of feeling.