Interesting. I’m no expert on Hume, the Enlightenment, Buddhism, or Existentialism, so just a few questions this entry poses for me:

1. Does this make Hume a forerunner of the existentialists? Is that a thing? Or was he too different to say that?

2. Hume claims that a lot of things are left intact following the revelations he posits. Including ‘morality’. Some kind of morality perhaps. But most kinds we are familiar with rely on ascribing some kind of more-than-physical reality to humans and some kind of more-than-naturally-occurring definition to human rights, and indeed some kind of discrete identity to ourselves and others. In what way is morality therefore left intact? If anything, it would be reduced to a purely transactional set of power relations.

3. This is the existentialist bit for me. I’ve been trying for some time to generate meaning for myself in existentialist mode. It’s not working. Even when it seems to succeed, at the base of it is some older meaning, and if it isn’t eternal life or the soul, then it’s identity, or accomplishment, or community, or kinship, or culture. All of which, strictly, are also not really real in any non-transient sense.

Clearly I’m reading too much into him. I’ve not heard him described this way. But it sounds like Hume constitutes Enlightenment man’s declaration of war on the idea of meaning.