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David Hume, Buddhism & search for Eastern roots of the Western Enlightenment

#1
C C Offline
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/arch...is/403195/

EXCERPT: [...] Everything that had defined me was gone. I was no longer a scientist or a philosopher or a wife or a mother or a lover. My doctors prescribed Prozac, yoga, and meditation. I hated Prozac. I was terrible at yoga. But meditation seemed to help, and it was interesting, at least. In fact, researching meditation seemed to help as much as actually doing it. Where did it come from? Why did it work?

I had always been curious about Buddhism, although, as a committed atheist, I was suspicious of anything religious. And turning 50 and becoming bisexual and Buddhist did seem far too predictable—a sort of Berkeley bat mitzvah, a standard rite of passage for aging Jewish academic women in Northern California. But still, I began to read Buddhist philosophy.

In 1734, in scotland, a 23-year-old was falling apart. As a teenager, he’d thought he had glimpsed a new way of thinking and living, and ever since, he’d been trying to work it out and convey it to others in a great book. The effort was literally driving him mad. His heart raced and his stomach churned. He couldn’t concentrate.

[...] The young man’s name was David Hume. Somehow, during the next three years, he managed not only to recover but also, remarkably, to write his book. Even more remarkably, it turned out to be one of the greatest books in the history of philosophy: A Treatise of Human Nature.

In his Treatise, Hume rejected the traditional religious and philosophical accounts of human nature. Instead, he took Newton as a model and announced a new science of the mind, based on observation and experiment. That new science led him to radical new conclusions. He argued that there was no soul, no coherent self, no “I.” “When I enter most intimately into what I call myself,” he wrote in the Treatise, “I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception.”
How did Hume come up with these ideas, so profoundly at odds with the Western philosophy and religion of his day?

[...] Until Hume, philosophers had searched for metaphysical foundations supporting our ordinary experience, an omnipotent God or a transcendent reality outside our minds. But Hume undermined all that. When you really look hard at everything we think we know, he argued, the foundations crumble. Descartes at least had said you always know that you yourself exist (“I think, therefore I am”), but Hume rejected even that premise.

Hume articulates a thoroughgoing, vertiginous, existential kind of doubt. In the Treatise, he reports that when he first confronted those doubts himself he was terrified—“affrighted and confounded.” They made him feel like “some strange uncouth monster.” No wonder he turned to the doctors.

But here’s Hume’s really great idea: Ultimately, the metaphysical foundations don’t matter. Experience is enough all by itself. What do you lose when you give up God or “reality” or even “I”? The moon is still just as bright; you can still predict that a falling glass will break, and you can still act to catch it; you can still feel compassion for the suffering of others. Science and work and morality remain intact. Go back to your backgammon game after your skeptical crisis, Hume wrote, and it will be exactly the same game.

In fact, if you let yourself think this way, your life might actually get better. Give up the prospect of life after death, and you will finally really appreciate life before it. Give up metaphysics, and you can concentrate on physics. Give up the idea of your precious, unique, irreplaceable self, and you might actually be more sympathetic to other people.

How did Hume come up with these ideas, so profoundly at odds with the Western philosophy and religion of his day? What turned the neurotic Presbyterian teenager into the great founder of the European Enlightenment?

In my shabby room, as I read Buddhist philosophy, I began to notice something that others had noticed before me. Some of the ideas in Buddhist philosophy sounded a lot like what I had read in Hume’s Treatise. But this was crazy. Surely in the 1730s, few people in Europe knew about Buddhist philosophy.

Still, as I read, I kept finding parallels. The Buddha doubted the existence of an omnipotent, benevolent God. In his doctrine of “emptiness,” he suggested that we have no real evidence for the existence of the outside world. He said that our sense of self is an illusion, too. The Buddhist sage Nagasena elaborated on this idea. The self, he said, is like a chariot. A chariot has no transcendent essence; it’s just a collection of wheels and frame and handle. Similarly, the self has no transcendent essence; it’s just a collection of perceptions and emotions.

“I never can catch myself at any time without a perception.”

That sure sounded like Buddhist philosophy to me—except, of course, that Hume couldn’t have known anything about Buddhist philosophy.

Or could he have?

[...] I haunted the theology sections of used-book stores and spent the solitary evenings reading. I would sit in front of my grand fireplace, where a single sawdust log smoldered, wrapped in several duvets, and learn more about Buddhism.

I discovered that at least one person in Europe in the 1730s not only knew about Buddhism but had studied Buddhist philosophy for years. His name was Ippolito Desideri, and he had been a Jesuit missionary in Tibet. In 1728, just before Hume began the Treatise, Desideri finished his book, the most complete and accurate European account of Buddhist philosophy to be written until the 20th century. The catch was that it wasn’t published. No Catholic missionary could publish anything without the approval of the Vatican—and officials there had declared that Desideri’s book could not be printed. The manuscript disappeared into the Church’s archives.

I still couldn’t think or write about children, but maybe I could write an essay about Hume and Buddhism and include Desideri as a sort of close call—a missed connection.

I consulted Ernest Mossner’s classic biography of Hume. When Hume wrote the Treatise, he was living in a little French town called La Flèche, 160 miles southwest of Paris. Mossner said Hume went to La Flèche to “rusticate,” probably because it was cheap. But he also mentioned that La Flèche was home to the Jesuit Royal College.

So Hume lived near a French Jesuit college when he wrote the Treatise. This was an intriguing coincidence for my essay...
#2
Yazata Offline
I'm not sure that Hume was influenced by Desideri.

It is more likely that he was influenced by the skeptical tradition. (He calls himself a 'Pyrrhonist'.) Skepticism was very much alive in early modern Western philosophy and it obviously influenced Descartes as well as Hume. (Descartes wrote in opposition to it.) We see other responses to skepticism in the writings of people like Glanville and in the Scottish 'common sense' philosophy. Those are probably the currents that influenced Hume.

Skepticism was revived in Europe during the renaissance, when ancient authors like Sextus Empiricus (our primary source on ancient Pyrrhonism) were rediscovered. And this ancient Greek skepticism has a close resemblance to Buddhism, which was flourishing in India at the same time as the Greek skeptics.

There's a growing literature on the possibility of an ancient connection. Several recent books explore it. One that I have on my shelf is 'Greek Buddha' by Christopher Beckwith (2015 Princeton U.P.), that suggests that the famous Greek skeptic Pyrrho of Elis encountered Buddhism during his travels to the east (he accompanied Alexander the Great). The book explores the close parallels between Pyrrhonism and early Pali Buddhism.

http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10500.html

My own observation is that ancient sources say that Pyrrho studied in India with what the Greeks called the 'gymnosophists', the 'naked philosophers' (Greek men exercised in the gymnasium naked). But lay Buddhists of the time dressed normally and monastics dressed themselves in monastic robes. So if the 'gymnosophist' thing is accurate, Pyrrho might have actually encountered Jains and not Buddhists. Jain monastics often were naked or as the Jains called it, 'skyclad'.

Other recent books on the same topic include:

'Epoche and Sunyata: Skepticism East and West' by Jay Garfield

'Pyrrhonism and Madhyamika' by Thomas McEvilley

'Pyrrhonism: How the Ancient Greeks Reinvented Buddhism' by Adrian Kuzminski

'The Shape of Ancient Thought: Comparative Studies in Greek and Indian Philosophies' by Thomas McEvilley


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