When Hume lived in La Flèche
Alison Gopnik has a terrific article in The Atlantic. Drop everything and read it, as I just did.
She starts with her personal crisis in which a lot of things fell apart and triggered other things falling apart, and she couldn’t work. (She’s a philosopher and a psychologist. I think I’ve quoted her in the past.)
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?
So she began to read Buddhist philosophy.
Then there’s David Hume. He had a crisis himself, at age 23; he too couldn’t work, although he had ideas he badly wanted to write up.
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.”
Contemporary cognitive science confirms this. There is no unitary self, it’s an illusion that makes a bunch of disparate things seem to cohere.
Hume had always been one of my heroes. I had known and loved his work since I was an undergraduate. In my own scientific papers I’d argued, like Hume, that the coherent self is an illusion. My research had convinced me that our selves are something we construct, not something we discover. I had found that when we are children, we don’t connect the “I” of the present to the “I” of the past and the future. We learn to be who we are.
This is one reason I find the way a lot of people talk about their “identity” and take it terribly seriously quite frustrating.
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 theTreatise, 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.
And does that remind you of anything? Yes, of course: of Buddhism.
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?
The rest of the article is about the scholarly detective work Gopnik did to find out, and – spoiler alert – she discovered that he could have. It’s not for sure that he did, but he could have. He knew some Jesuits who knew the one guy in Europe who could have informed him about Buddhist philosophy. He knew the Jesuits well, and the one guy in Europe knew Buddhist philosophy well. It’s a great story.
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.
But! Desideri paid a visit to a little French town called La Flèche, home to the Jesuit Royal College. Eight years later, Hume lived in La Flèche while writing the Treatise. He socialized with the Jesuits, who were keen intellectuals. One of them in particular had talked to Desideri a lot. So. It’s possible.
I remember reading The Society of Mind by Marvin Minsky back in the late 1980s. It wasn’t my first exposure to the idea that what we think of as ‘consciousness’ is basically an emergent property of lots of stuff happening under the surface: the idea was touched on in Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter as well, and also in The Mind’s I which Hofstadter co-edited with Daniel Dennett. The idea is also a significant part of the work by Michael Persinger, though he’s wandered off into bizarro-land at other points.
Heck, studies done on people with various forms of physical brain damage definitely confirm this. You get effects like people who can recognize an object if it’s in front of only one of their eyes, but can’t actually verbalize the word for it unless it’s put in front of their other eye instead.
Consciousness is really just the name we give to our constant background stream of justifications as to why we’re doing what we’re doing. The lower-level decisions were made already, tens of milliseconds before our conscious mind started constructing a narrative around it to maintain a sense of personal continuity.
Another good one is Leonard Mlodinow’s Subliminal. I remember some slides he showed at the CFI conference in Tacoma two years ago, about the choppy way we actually see things compared to the smooth way we think we see them because the brain creates the illusion. Very unsettling and interesting.
Haven’t read that one; I’ll have to take a look.
But the choppy bit… well, yes. Just the fact that we mostly ignore the way our heads shift up and down while walking is good proof of that. We tend not to notice when we blink. Eyes and attention can twitch briefly to one side to fill in details while our main mental focus remains in one location, and again we don’t even really notice.
And some of this probably ties back in to the fallibility of memory. We don’t actually remember everything that happened in the past, we remember a framework of certain events and things that stood out, and reconstruct the rest of it on recall. (And then tend to tint the original memories with whatever else was in our mind during that recall.)
When you look at them in minute detail, a lot of biology, anatomy, and neurology tend to go well into the ‘dancing bear’ territory. People don’t applaud because the bear dances all that well; they applaud because it’s amazing that it can dance at all.
The brain is such a mess of shortcuts and patch jobs that it’s simply amazing that it works as well as it does.
Actually, on a different thread from the post, I remember hearing a radio discussion a couple of years ago. It was about a book that had been published, talking about the early Church and its missionary efforts into Asia, particularly India and China.
The interesting thing is that there was a huge amount of scholarly work done at the time: the Christian missionaries going over there had to be willing to learn entirely new languages and cultures (usually several of them) and so tended to be heavily in the educated Jesuit side of the church. They would often get hired by locals as translators and sometimes even as diplomats, due to them usually not being on either side of old grudges. Many of the earliest translations of old legends came from those missionaries.
And most of it ended up getting buried because by the time they got back home decades later the Church’s politics had grown more insular, and it was more concerned about suppressing heresy at home rather than spreading the word as they had been when all those missionaries went out into the field.
A couple of books to share–I’m reading this now and it’s fascinating:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Master_and_His_Emissary
A book about the strong informational connections between ‘East’ and ‘West’ before the Industrial Revolution, and the generally unacknowledged connection between the former and the latter:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eastern_Origins_of_Western_Civilisation