It started as a solution to the absurdity of radical skepticism: By accepting whatever notions were making him hold out for some perfect intellectual proof before accepting any doctrines, he was of course accepting the doctrines underlying the acceptance of those notions. The whole thing was just too ridiculous. We always accept some irreducibles: some unprovable basic assumptions about how we should think and act, and at least assuming that our inner directions towards “truer” and “better” are correct allows for thought that isn’t automatically self-defeating (we can’t help but assume those directions, so thought that tries to doubt them is self-refuting and amounts only to looking away from itself, not travelling with itself to its own conclusions, and generally pretending itself away). And it had to be further admitted that without accepting that inner sense that life is meaningful and kindness matters and people matter and that there’s a light within that matters and that tells our ideas and feelings all this (not perfectly, but in a poetry that we had no reason to suppose inadequate), we don’t really believe in any of our ideas or feelings. And so Something Deeperism took hold: it was the needed philosophical solution; and it allowed him to stop going in hopeless circles all day long; and it rebuffed not just radical skepticism, but also his long-time foe fundamentalism (because like radical skepticism, fundamentalism tried to get human thought to be literal at the price of letting ideas and feelings be informed by each individual’s deepest and widest aspect of thought).

But now look at him!

He is stuck with platitudes and with circling in la la land.