Own Existence example essay topic

The ultimate question that Hume seems to be seeking an answer to is that of why is that we believe what we believe. For most of us the answer is grounded in our own personal experiences and can in no way be justified by a common or worldly assumption. Our pasts, according to Hume, are reliant on some truths which we have justified according to reason, but in being a skeptic reason is hardly a solution for anything concerning our past, present or future. Our reasoning according to causality is slightly inhibited in that Hume suggests that it is not that we are not able to know anything about future events based on past experiences, but rather that we are just not rationally justified in believing those things that we do. We can most certainly make inferences based on causal reasoning, but these inferences have no proofs. Insofar as empiricism questions all that we experience a posterior i there is no other outcome but skepticism.

We must doubt all the senses as they can fool us and often times they do. Nonetheless there can be no doubt to the notion that there is some power that draws us to be skeptics or that leads us to be rational. We are both at the same time, and this, I believe, is what creates the natural balance of the universe and our lives. There is some form of harmonic coexistence within us that allows for such uncertainties to be present in our lives, but at the same time that allows us to have undeniable, justifiable [and sometimes unjustifiable] truths to which we hold onto for the explanation of things such as our very own existence.

Everything we think we know is upheld only by what Descartes has taught us, the cog ito. Individualistically, we have reason and we believe what we choose to believe. On the basis of philosophy and the claims of science to know, only philosophy, in its yearning for certainty, has tried to suggest that there is such a thing as a law of cause and effect. Science rests content in making predictions based on experience without claiming any kind of certainty or privileged reasoning to back these predictions up. Hume might then also defend his own philosophy, saying that he proceeds according to a similar method.

So, in the terms of causal relation, we are left with uncertainty unless we rely on these laws that describe cause and effect. And what of these laws then? How can we be so sure of the foundation of these laws, or what these laws have to offer to us? As noted earlier, philosophy falls into the category of an individualized tool, great minds think alike, but they do so one their own not dependent on one another. Science tries to posit explanations for our existence here and for the existence of everything around us. No matter how many "proofs" exist though, each has to have derived from some "thought" or "idea" that has no concreteness to it.

As Hume first explains in his Enquiry, there are relations of ideas that lead us to justify certain scientific proofs empirically. Kant calls this analytic versus synthetic. In being a naturalist, Hume relates humans as being one in the same with animals, at least when it comes to causal reasoning. We are no more reasonable than animals because the faculty of the human mind that allows us to see into the truth has arisen in us naturally. The sharp difference between humans and animals is the ability to draw on the inference of necessary connections in nature and being able to think about them. Hume does not doubt that there may exist some God with a form of discerning between right and wrong, but he denies that our ability to do so came from such a God.

We know a God has to exist only as a cause of the effects we ascribe to him. Hume describes God as an "empty hypothesis" because he is used only to explain certain phenomena that we may not otherwise be able to explain. We have no direct knowledge or first hand experience of God and so we cannot give Him any qualities besides those that we use to account for His existence in the first place. The idea of God in some shape or form is relative to the causal reasoning of many of us. This is what leads us to religion and believing in what we are said to believe in. Relations of religion and God always become treacherous ground to walk on because we are putting out faith in something that is not empirically true, and that is why perhaps so many rely on such a notion; the fact that science cannot explain certain phenomena.

Our day-to-day lives are grounded simply in that we know we wake up in the morning, we are conscious of that, and we know that we go to sleep at night, because we are aware of the motions we go through. Otherwise, in all that takes place in between, we cannot be certain of anything beyond what has been programmed to our very existence. When we go out to start the car in the morning, we believe it will rev up once we put the key in the ignition and turn it, so much as there is no mechanical problem that should hinder this action. Much like we know that if we see rain fall, we can expect for the ground to be wet.

This is a result of our experiences of such things in our everyday lives. So, if we were machines, if were brand new programs that are experiencing things for the first time, each and every "sensation" we come across would be embedded into our memories and would therefore account for and explaining the source of those "sensations" each and every time. At the end of his Enquiry, Hume leaves us with the tools of relations of ideas and matters of fact, but these however can not explain the existence of God, the immortality of the soul, the nature of matter and other such questions. To these, Hume denies that rationalism could ever posit an answer because that answer would be founded in nothing more than reason. If we are left then in a state of immobility where we can only trust or base our knowledge on that which is empirical, how are we to wake up in the morning without feeling are lost? The extreme form of consequent skepticism concludes unhappily that none of our judgments are rationally justified.

The only sensible thing to do in that case would be to suspend all judgment and to stop acting altogether. Skepticism is useful in that it places limitations on our reason and makes us doubt what we might otherwise take for granted, but it is ultimately unlivable. I can doubt all I please in the comfort of my study, but in order to get by in the world I must as least assume that there is an external world and that my judgments and actions in that world make some sort of difference.