How an 18th-Century Philosopher Helped Solve My Midlife Crisis
September 18, 2015 11:10 AM Subscribe
Was David Hume inspired by Buddhist thinking in the 18th century? Alison Gopnik explores the idea in a touching article about her recovery from depression and divorce along with her discovery that Hume may have been influenced by more than just Descartes and Spinoza.
From the article:
From the article:
As I was doing my research, many unfailingly helpful historians told me that my quirky personal project reflected a much broader trend. Historians have begun to think about the Enlightenment in a newly global way. Those creaky wooden ships carried ideas across the boundaries of continents, languages, and religions just as the Internet does now (although they were a lot slower and perhaps even more perilous).In particular, Gopnik finds interesting clues that Hume was influenced by two Jesuit priests who were among the first to study Buddhism: Ippolito Desideri and Père Tolu. More details are in a related academic paper.
I read this yesterday...boy, did she go a long way to try to prove (and she came close!) an outrageous thesis. Hume as influenced by the teachings of the Buddha, by way of Tibet.
I remember writing a paper as a college freshman in my Rationalism and Empiricism class (the last philosophy class I took) trying to argue that language's innate limitations undermined these philosophers' arguments, based partly on my half-baked understanding of Zen Buddhism. That's my connection between Hume and Buddha. No personal crisis or insightful writing here, unlike the article. (By the way, the professor didn't think much of my paper.)
posted by kozad at 11:33 AM on September 18, 2015 [1 favorite]
I remember writing a paper as a college freshman in my Rationalism and Empiricism class (the last philosophy class I took) trying to argue that language's innate limitations undermined these philosophers' arguments, based partly on my half-baked understanding of Zen Buddhism. That's my connection between Hume and Buddha. No personal crisis or insightful writing here, unlike the article. (By the way, the professor didn't think much of my paper.)
posted by kozad at 11:33 AM on September 18, 2015 [1 favorite]
There's also a Philosophy Bites episode about this here if you're more into listening to podcasts.
posted by delicious-luncheon at 11:37 AM on September 18, 2015 [3 favorites]
posted by delicious-luncheon at 11:37 AM on September 18, 2015 [3 favorites]
What a wonderful article, with its multiple, interwoven romances (philosophical, historical, sexual).
I now need to reread Possession this weekend.
posted by zenoli at 12:04 PM on September 18, 2015
I now need to reread Possession this weekend.
posted by zenoli at 12:04 PM on September 18, 2015
Oh man, I am so excited to dive into this later today, thanks for this post! Her thesis is one of those that feels intuitively true but must be nearly impossible to prove.
posted by LooseFilter at 12:13 PM on September 18, 2015
posted by LooseFilter at 12:13 PM on September 18, 2015
Ok, so when did The Atlantic start publishing interesting articles again?
posted by paper chromatographologist at 12:43 PM on September 18, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by paper chromatographologist at 12:43 PM on September 18, 2015 [1 favorite]
The first 2/3 of this were super interesting, until the ads repeatedly froze my browser. I think it's time to invest in ad-block, since I have no objection to paying for things with some very diluted attention but I draw the line this this type of thing.
The whole "and I reinvented myself with excitement" bit grows a bit tiresome, of course, when you remember that everyone involved in this story is extraordinarily financially privileged. No matter how clever you are or how curious about history, you're out of luck if you're not well off with lots of free time.
It’s hard to imagine how Desideri kept any sense at all of who he was. He spent all his time reading, writing, and thinking about another religion, in another language.
That strikes me as a strained observation, though. What does one mean by "sense of who he was" in this context? I feel like there's always this tension in this kind of article, where people want to say "the subject is just a loose agglomeration of coincidences, mutable and subject to perpetual change" - which is fine - and then seem to want to go from there to suggest that the illusion of the self isn't foundational to functioning in the world. People "know who they are" through interacting with others, and the level at which we "don't know who we are" tends to be a fairly cerebral one. "Am I still an anarchist if I have a union gig and am not an active part of any anarchist political projects" describes a really different situation than the dissolution of the "I" that you see in, for instance, late stage dementia (a thing I've observed in a relative). "I don't think my past and my present make a coherent narrative" isn't at all the same as "I cannot invent a narrative to connect my past and present because my brain will no longer do it".
posted by Frowner at 1:06 PM on September 18, 2015 [1 favorite]
The whole "and I reinvented myself with excitement" bit grows a bit tiresome, of course, when you remember that everyone involved in this story is extraordinarily financially privileged. No matter how clever you are or how curious about history, you're out of luck if you're not well off with lots of free time.
It’s hard to imagine how Desideri kept any sense at all of who he was. He spent all his time reading, writing, and thinking about another religion, in another language.
That strikes me as a strained observation, though. What does one mean by "sense of who he was" in this context? I feel like there's always this tension in this kind of article, where people want to say "the subject is just a loose agglomeration of coincidences, mutable and subject to perpetual change" - which is fine - and then seem to want to go from there to suggest that the illusion of the self isn't foundational to functioning in the world. People "know who they are" through interacting with others, and the level at which we "don't know who we are" tends to be a fairly cerebral one. "Am I still an anarchist if I have a union gig and am not an active part of any anarchist political projects" describes a really different situation than the dissolution of the "I" that you see in, for instance, late stage dementia (a thing I've observed in a relative). "I don't think my past and my present make a coherent narrative" isn't at all the same as "I cannot invent a narrative to connect my past and present because my brain will no longer do it".
posted by Frowner at 1:06 PM on September 18, 2015 [1 favorite]
The young man’s name was David Hume. Somehow, during the next three years, he managed not only to recover but also, remarkably, to outconsume Schopenhauer and Hegel.
(seriously though, great piece, and oddly relevant to my own interests)
posted by Naberius at 3:27 PM on September 18, 2015
(seriously though, great piece, and oddly relevant to my own interests)
posted by Naberius at 3:27 PM on September 18, 2015
Interesting, but I think she's badly wrong on three counts.
First, her pursuit of Desideri is irrelevant because although decent translations of the texts might not have been available, Buddhist ideas were not that obscure. Even in the Middle Ages a garbled version of the life of Buddha called Barlaam and Josaphat was fairly well known and apparently influential in promoting meditation. Hume probably had plenty of sources.
Second, though, it's sort of insulting to suggest Hume didn't come up with his own ideas but had to derive them from other people. He tells us how he reached his conclusions - the basis for them is important - and he was not a liar. If he found these ideas somewhere else he would absolutely have said so.
Third, she's inattentive to Hume. What he says about the self is, I think, unique. Buddhists, and many modern philosophers, say the self is a powerful illusion that we have to work hard to dispel. Hume doesn't think there really is an illusion; when I bother to look carefully, he says, I find nothing except a bundle of perceptions. This is important because Buddhists think the whole world is an illusion, whereas Hume, as an empiricist, believes the real world is the only reliable source of truth. He is, in important respects, about the least Buddhist person you can imagine, an implacable enemy of mysticism.
posted by Segundus at 1:36 AM on September 19, 2015 [8 favorites]
First, her pursuit of Desideri is irrelevant because although decent translations of the texts might not have been available, Buddhist ideas were not that obscure. Even in the Middle Ages a garbled version of the life of Buddha called Barlaam and Josaphat was fairly well known and apparently influential in promoting meditation. Hume probably had plenty of sources.
Second, though, it's sort of insulting to suggest Hume didn't come up with his own ideas but had to derive them from other people. He tells us how he reached his conclusions - the basis for them is important - and he was not a liar. If he found these ideas somewhere else he would absolutely have said so.
Third, she's inattentive to Hume. What he says about the self is, I think, unique. Buddhists, and many modern philosophers, say the self is a powerful illusion that we have to work hard to dispel. Hume doesn't think there really is an illusion; when I bother to look carefully, he says, I find nothing except a bundle of perceptions. This is important because Buddhists think the whole world is an illusion, whereas Hume, as an empiricist, believes the real world is the only reliable source of truth. He is, in important respects, about the least Buddhist person you can imagine, an implacable enemy of mysticism.
posted by Segundus at 1:36 AM on September 19, 2015 [8 favorites]
I don't really know enough about historical Buddhism to do more than speculate here, but: was there a tradition of understanding the self as a persistent or fundamentally real entity that it was arguing against, in a way that was analogous to the kind of Cartesian idea of spiritual substance that (I take) Hume to be trying to finish off?
posted by thelonius at 7:57 AM on September 19, 2015
posted by thelonius at 7:57 AM on September 19, 2015
The No-Self Theory: Hume, Buddhism, and Personal Identity
Via
posted by homunculus at 12:54 PM on September 24, 2015
Via
posted by homunculus at 12:54 PM on September 24, 2015
Hume's 'Treatise' And The Problem Of Early Success
posted by homunculus at 4:05 PM on September 29, 2015
posted by homunculus at 4:05 PM on September 29, 2015
Though there's much gritting of the teeth on the various archetypical Boomer bits in this piece, it's still nice to see a more mainstream media outlet speak a bit more seriously about the early modern period and intellectual history.
The connections between East & West are actually pretty well known, if you've rooted around enough. The Jesuits (who perhaps are underrated and get a good plug here) brought back some really interesting stuff to Europe, including methods of bureaucratic rule they learned from the Chinese (I'm surprised the contact w China didn't make it to Gopnik's piece). In fact, this sort of thing is the actually taught in freshmen world history surveys.
What really astonishes me about the article is that someone who had been a successful professor in the social sciences and PHILOSOPHY knew so little about the Early Modern period, and is taken up by such a "golly gee!" mood when she discovers what her colleagues down the hall do all the time: "The librarians, accustomed to Rare Book Room epiphanies, smiled instead of shushing me."
For the last twenty years or so, historians of the West have finally broken out of their "not invented here" bubble. It's a much more honest and interesting story. Gopnik's midlife crisis, not so much. We all need to have something to keep us interested. That's just about it.
posted by nothing.especially.clever at 7:50 AM on October 4, 2015
The connections between East & West are actually pretty well known, if you've rooted around enough. The Jesuits (who perhaps are underrated and get a good plug here) brought back some really interesting stuff to Europe, including methods of bureaucratic rule they learned from the Chinese (I'm surprised the contact w China didn't make it to Gopnik's piece). In fact, this sort of thing is the actually taught in freshmen world history surveys.
What really astonishes me about the article is that someone who had been a successful professor in the social sciences and PHILOSOPHY knew so little about the Early Modern period, and is taken up by such a "golly gee!" mood when she discovers what her colleagues down the hall do all the time: "The librarians, accustomed to Rare Book Room epiphanies, smiled instead of shushing me."
For the last twenty years or so, historians of the West have finally broken out of their "not invented here" bubble. It's a much more honest and interesting story. Gopnik's midlife crisis, not so much. We all need to have something to keep us interested. That's just about it.
posted by nothing.especially.clever at 7:50 AM on October 4, 2015
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