Philosophy

Having just finished reading a book on the Enlightenment philosophers, it seems they all come up short of the deepest mysteries of our existence. Immanuel Kant resorts to "noumena", something outside of space and time and consequently things that we can never truly know: (the spiritual?; the divine?). Although the author states that they are nothing like Plato's forms, they sound suspiciously alike to me. (But what the heck do I know!)

Plato himself had the rather (to me) amorphous, "the good", which strikes me as rather numinous.

Hume says that there is no way we can prove cause and effect and seems to me to basically say that we just have to believe it--which sounds like faith (that much-maligned virtue these days) to me.

I think that Kant's moral maxim that we should only act in such a way that we can will the rule by which we act to be a universal law is very apt. But he sets such store by a priori knowledge and I fail to see how one gets there by that process.

In contrast, Hume is completely utilitarian, basing morality on what creates (I suppose) the greatest good for the greatest number.

But it strikes me that they and Locke and Descartes and all the rest finally have to resort to faith and the spiritual in the end.

But then again, what do I know?