By Hywel D. Lewis (auth.)
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Extra info for The Self and Immortality
Sample text
If you assault me it is not like damaging my car, you injure me; if I am kissed on the lips, I am kissed, not a phantom or some appurtenance of mine. How do we cope with this dilemma? Some will say at this point that the dilemma is just what philosophers invariably end up in by tackling their problems in the present way. There must be something phoney about an investigation where we seem to be driven round in circles saying now one thing and then, with equal conviction, the opposite. We have, perhaps, a pseudo problem on our hands and the whole enterprise must be radically changed before we make any headway.
And it was in the confident assurance that this was the fate which awaited him, inevitably in virtue of what we are and not because of any unkindly or hostile attitude of any other power towards us, that Hume drew to the close of his own life, with great self-possession and humour as we have seen. The position adopted here by Hume is compatible with a distinction between extended and non-extended existence, and he himself based the distinction upon that between impressions of sight and touch, which alone give us the idea of extension, and those of sound, taste, smell and feeling which do not.
We do somehow think of ourselves as beings in our own right, however much we may acknowledge our indebtedness to others and to society. We could not, admittedly, exist without other people and the world we inhabit, we could not be in a void; and there seems to be more than a recognition of causal factors here. There may even be some sense in which our responsibilities are shared, though that is a very tricky question. But when every allowance of this sort has been made, there remains the very firm impression that everyone of us has some kind of being or actual reality to which the idea of'a centre' or 'focus' or 'principle' seems hardly to do proper justice.