307. Hume's Pile of Applesauce

You know, some philosophers are so damn wrong you've just got to quit being an academic and say, "This is a pile of applesauce."  And that's what I'm going to say about one of Alison Gopnik's favorite philosophers (The Atlantic, 10-15), and one of mine (once): David Hume.

The problem is The Self.  Hume says there is no such coherent thing.  There's just a bunch of perceptions and responses.  Gopnik  found that Buddha said pretty much the same thing and loved him for it, and loved connecting the two.  Postmodern French philosophers loved him for it, insofar as they can love any Anglophone philosopher.

OK, where's the applesauce?

J. D. Salinger points us to it.  Awed by the budding beauty and character of a British girl in the course of  his tearoom conversation with her (in "For Esmé, with Love and Squalor"), Salinger hears her put a standard slur on American soldiers.  "I hope that's not worthy of you," he says.  What would her slur not be worthy of?  My fourth-grade teacher hears me speaking the most awful trash on the playground, just so I can make it with some trashy kids, and says, "Roland, that's not you."  My mother, after I've verbally abused the girl downstairs, says, "That's not the Roland I know."  I blush with shame.

What I want Hume, Buddha, and all those postmodernists to tell me is this: What blushes?  What's your name for it?  Something raises expectations, something is trusted, something takes responsibility, something is embarrassed.  Even before my mother and my teachers spoke to me it was there, in me, an idea of what I was.  If it weren't why did I respond so?  Why did I blush?

Plato gave capitals to my idea of what I was. The Idea of Roland. That was abstract philosophy but it was close enough to my experience, to the words people around me used, to the words I used, in the world and inside myself, to check out.  Plato was twenty times closer to this thing my teachers saw in me and Salinger saw in the girl than Hume or Buddha or Paul de Man was.  The ordinary Medieval/Renaissance Christian, with his word "soul," was  thirty times closer.  Dante was forty times closer.  Donne sixty.  Milton a hundred.

Nobody whose time is short (not just me, friends) wants to waste any of it digging into a pile of applesauce.  We all could use a detector.  Here's one I'll pass on: any time you pick up "the destruction of the coherent Self," or any similar locution, keep going.  Life's too short.