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. 3 This is philosophical detachment runwild but beautifully described, with pathos and existential declaratives.Theproblem of speaking with others arises: I call upon others to join me, inorder to make a company apart; but no one will hearken to me.Every onekeeps at a distance, and dreads that storm, which beats upon me fromevery side. This is Plato s Eleatic Stranger with a vengeance, a foreignernot just to Athens but to the whole human race: Where am I, or what? 4Hume has tried to enter the transcendental, phenomenological attitudebut has done so without the subtlety and distinction that it requires.His onlyway of validating the natural attitude, therefore, is simply to rejoin it and todrop his philosophical questioning, not to contemplate the natural attitudeand its world sympathetically: Most fortunately it happens, that since reasonis incapable of dispelling these clouds, nature herself suffices to that pur-pose, and cures me of this philosophical melancholy and delirium, either byrelaxing this bent of mind, or by some avocation, and lively impression ofmy senses, which obliterate all these chimeras. He gets over philosophy byrelaxing into the natural attitude with his friends: I dine, I play a game of3David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed.L.A.Selby-Bigge (Oxford: The ClarendonPress, 1960), 264.4Ibid., 269. 160 The Content of Thinkingback-gammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends. At this point, heretains no fondness for philosophy but is glad to have been relieved of it: And when after three or four hours amusement, I wou d return to thesespeculations, they appear so cold, and strain d, and ridiculous, that I cannotfind in my heart to enter into them any farther. Hume s reason goes off the tracks because he, poor man, starts witha doctrine of what one might call mental representations ( perceptions, which he divides into impressions and ideas, which differ only in theirvivacity), and also because he has no way of showing that philosophicalreflection continues the trajectory of natural reasoning even as it takesa distance from it.He cannot show that there is continuity as well asdifference between natural language and philosophical speech.He hasnot had the benefit of Husserl s analyses of the transcendental reduction.In fact, it need not and should not be upsetting to enter into philosophy;philosophy liberates and attracts, it does not sequester the person whopractices it; entering into philosophy does not make us lose anything butgives us a new and fascinating perspective on the whole, no matter howincomplete our grasp of that whole may be.5 Nor need we abandonphilosophy when we recover the natural attitude; it always remainsa concern and an illumination on the margin of things and of ourselves.There is such a thing as the philosophical life, and it does have somethingto think about.It confirms and refines the identities and differences thatoccur in our pre-philosophical lives, and it does so from a new angle, witha new perspective, and with its appropriate modification of language.It is highly regrettable that the British Empiricists contaminate theirphilosophy by beginning with mental representations.Both Hume sTreatise and John Locke s An Essay concerning Human Understanding aremarvelous works of metaphysics.They discuss such prototypical themesas identity and difference, substance and relations, parts and wholes,causes and effects, chance and existence, and seeming and being.Theymake many wonderful observations, but they spoil it all by claiming thateverything they say applies only to the walls of the cabinet of their minds,to ideas, impressions, or perceptions, not to the being of things.Whata sad waste of philosophical talent! If we could use something likea philosophical virus scan to clear away the distorting subjectivism5The entry into the dimension of philosophy is analogous to our entry into the game oflanguage.As soon as we name something, its entire intelligibility is being designated even ifwe have only a feeble grasp of it.As soon as we shift from the natural attitude intophilosophy, we have the entire philosophical world given to us.The turn to philosophyopens a prospect.The whole promised land is there, even if we have only glimpsed it andcannot yet make out the features of its landscape.See Edmund Husserl, Ideas: GeneralIntroduction to Pure Phenomenology, trans.W.R.Boyce Gibson (New York: Macmillan, 1931), Author s Preface to the English Edition, 29: The author sees the infinite open country ofthe true philosophy, the promised land on which he himself will never set foot. Mental Representations 161infecting these writings, we would be left with metaphysical treatises thatcompared favorably to the classics of that genre.There is a natural melancholy that affects reflective people.Aristotleasks, Why is it that all men who have become outstanding in philosophy,statesmanship, poetry or the arts are melancholic? After citing severalexamples, he continues: In later times also there have been Empedocles,Plato, Socrates, and many other well-known men.The same is true of mostof those who have dealt with poetry. 6 This despondency can be dealt withby customary remedies, but it is made pathological and Nietzschean whenit is reinforced by the doctrine of ideas, which locks us into ourselves withno hope of exit.My attempt to deal with the problem of mental representations is alsoan attempt to restore the authentic philosophy latent in the BritishEmpiricists and to overcome the disjunction between what Hume calls the ancient philosophy and the modern philosophy. 7 The dichotomybetween the modern and the premodern must be surmounted if we areto return to philosophy as such and escape a historicized counterfeit
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