This is such a great autobiographical account that manages to do two incredible things at once. It chronicles the discovery of a very interesting historical possibility. While doing so, it also explores the interplay between the personal and professional lives of a very accomplished researcher.
I love the theme of how discovery and research are the source of both melancholy and ecstasy. Gopnik herself seems to have found fulfillment and an escape from other troubles in the exciting new questions she encountered about Hume's influences. The other side of the same coin is Hume's depression during the period when he found himself incapable of making significant progress on his thesis.
> "When you’re young, you want things: work, love, children. When you reach middle age, you want to want things. When you’re depressed, you no longer want anything. Desire, hope, the future itself—all seem to vanish, as they had for me. But now I at least wanted to know whether Hume could have heard about Desideri. It was a sign that my future might return."
The other theme of interest to the tech community is the interplay of personal and professional lives. If you consider the two aspects of one's life, personal relationships and professional fulfillment, each provides a hedge against possible problems with the other. Interesting explorations in one's work can help pull one from other problems in life.
There is a significant time-varying component of probabilistic luck in whether one's life and work will be fulfilling, but I think it makes sense to constantly strive to bias these probabilities towards outcomes that involve working on exciting projects and building meaningful personal relationships.
I think this article is a strong descriptive companion to Zach Weinersmith's popular comic about 'eleven lifetimes' http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2722
> "When you’re young, you want things: work, love, children. When you reach middle age, you want to want things. When you’re depressed, you no longer want anything.
It's funny that you quoted this line because I think it reveals a particular ignorance that the author has, namely a misunderstanding of depression due to her particular experience with it. A more truthful version, in my view, would be the following:
When you’re not depressed, you want things: work, love, children. When you have mild depression, you want to want things. When you’re deeply depressed, you no longer want anything.
Things here are broader than the physical. Not for all people who are depressed, but a general absence of desire is common. It includes desire for physical things that you may have once liked or collected. Lack of desire for social things like friends or lovers or perhaps any contact with other people. Even the desire to be alive, which for most people is just a given, can be absent. I, for example, was not actually suicidal, I just had no desire to exist, but also no desire to put forth the effort to end my existence.
I think this is meant in the context of having goals for oneself, some drive about something(s) to make you want to get out of bed ... not simply consuming products you don't need
Which is pretty ironic, considering that the people who completely lack desires tend to be those suferring major depression much more than those who have achieved an enlightened serenity.
As someone who has grappled with fairly severe depression, it's not that you have no desires. Your body does a decent job of making sure you maintain your body by giving you plenty.
I would merely say you have no rational desires. As a human your are functional, but as a rational human you've hit a wall.
I can't definitively say I've been depressed, but is it fair to say that you still have desires and want things, but it feels like there are insurmountable barriers between you and desires/things?
Yea, I think that's fair. I think it's also pretty subjective, so it wouldn't surprise me for people to experience it differently. But whatever is wrong or blocking one or one's desires (or whatever) is in one's brain, if not one's control.
Author's original paper: "Could David Hume Have Known about Buddhism? Charles Francois Dolu, the Royal College of La Flèche, and the Global Jesuit Intellectual Network"
This is an incredibly well-written and interesting piece. Is it only me, but what seems to have solved the author's problem is getting back "into the flow", by finding an area of research she was keenly interested in?
Also, this quote is hilarious:
> 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.
> what seems to have solved the author's problem is getting back "into the flow", by finding an area of research she was keenly interested in?
The clue is in the final paragraph:
"I had found my salvation in the sheer endless curiosity of the human mind—and the sheer endless variety of human experience."
After work, love, children - the author found a new purpose that is now worth living for. It seems life becomes worthwhile when there is some purpose to strive towards.
But wouldn't life be easier if we didn't rely on such purpose-driven mental states? Is it not possible to simply enjoy doing everyday things -- taking shower, eating, working, walking -- without contingent goals?
>But wouldn't life be easier if we didn't rely on such purpose-driven mental states? Is it not possible to simply enjoy doing everyday things -- taking shower, eating, working, walking -- without contingent goals?
Yes, that is how socialization works in adulthood, even in this supposedly liberalized age and part of the world. However there is a thrill in being (or aiming to be) a carefree loser while everyone else is busy being a solemn winner.
This is my single greatest personal goal in life! Not the "money, power, women" corruption[1].
David Hume pretty much ruined my life in college. I was totally bought in, but it is not a helpful mindview. When you let go like that, you aren't real anymore. There is benefit to real ideals, real things that exist outside of our senses and physical experience.
Glad he could help someone, but it was not me. You have to expand your mind at some point and accept there is mystery.
My favorite passage from David Hume's work `An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding`
“Where am I, or what? From what causes do I derive my existence, and to what condition shall I return? ... I am confounded with all these questions, and begin to fancy myself in the most deplorable condition imaginable, environed with the deepest darkness, and utterly deprived of the use of every member and faculty.
Most fortunately it happens, that since Reason is incapable of dispelling these clouds, Nature herself suffices to that purpose, and cures me of this philosophical melancholy and delirium, either by relaxing this bent of mind, or by some avocation, and lively impression of my senses, which obliterate all these chimeras. I dine, I play a game of backgammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends. And when, after three or four hours' amusement, I would return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strained, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any farther.”
One of the saddest things about modern college/university philosophy courses, I think, is how few people will ever end up reading any of the great philosopher's works in the original (nevermind even in the original language!). It's almost always condensed versions by another author of the "main ideas".
I had this experience when I picked up a copy of John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding and read the thing in the original. I was completely shaken by the beauty of it.
It saddens me because 90% of the beauty is lost in favor of "just getting to the main idea". You lose so, so much. It would be like reciting Homer without an understanding of meter. All beauty would be lost.
Yes, Hume is one of my favourite writers. I'd recommend his Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, and his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion.
"You have to expand your mind at some point and accept there is mystery."
I don't follow. The skeptical viewpoint that Hume takes is one that says we can't know. How does that not increase "mystery"? Having answers to questions is the very thing that tends to take mystery away.
"Matters of fact, which are the second objects of human reason, are not ascertained in the same manner; nor is our evidence of their truth, however great, of a like nature with the foregoing. The contrary of every matter of fact is still possible; because it can never imply a contradiction, and is conceived by the mind with the same facility and distinctness, as if ever so conformable to reality. That the sun will not rise to-morrow is no less intelligible a proposition, and implies no more contradiction than the affirmation, that it will rise. We should in vain, therefore, attempt to demonstrate its falsehood. Were it demonstratively false, it would imply a contradiction, and could never be distinctly conceived by the mind."
This is the quote that provoked uproarious laughter from Einstein, when he read it sitting on the beach at the holiday resort of Caputh(?) in the late 1930s as the storm clouds were gathering over Europe. He thought it genuinely hilarious. I offer this as consolation for your College concern. I am now searching for the reference. It was one of the biographies...
I'm on my phone hence it's a little tricky for me to search for outside references and copy/paste links, but this quote, or the idea behind it (as far as I can tell), reminds me of Heraclitus, and of Aristotle's critique of him as a guy who believes that both black and white are the same (this was not the comparison provided by neither of them, but that was the idea).
Now, I do think that had we not followed Aristotle and his basic logic principles we wouldn't have had science, nor reached the Moon, nor built smart-phones, but deep down we kind of all know that both Heraclitus and Hume are correct in their suggestion. I like to think that Einstein's laugh (apocriphical or not) was caused by this realization.
Also, to respond to the grand-parent post, I think there's still a lot of mistery in this world. I for myself have become an umanist once I stopped believing in religion or anything similar, meaning the human race never ceases to surprise me and to make me ask "how come we're doing the things we're doing". How come we're altruistic? How come we feel empathy for other people? How come we kill other people in wars? How come we create art? How come we're sometime mesmerized by it? How come we're nostalgic? How come Vronski got tired of Anna Karenina and wanted other things from life, even though she had given everything for him (a marriage, her kid)? How come we still wish Paris hadn't brought Helen back to Troy with him? etc etc
>Now, I do think that had we not followed Aristotle and his basic logic principles we wouldn't have had science, nor reached the Moon, nor built smart-phones, but deep down we kind of all know that both Heraclitus and Hume are correct in their suggestion. I like to think that Einstein's laugh (apocriphical or not) was caused by this realization.
Actually, I think if we had started off with something more like empiricism than Aristotelian rationalism, we'd have gotten to modern sciences a lot sooner.
The process of scholarly search is interesting. In the future, how will we discover such connections? Just think if Hume was alive today and some future scholar wanted to know if he was influenced by Buddhism. Easy enough to find out: check his Google search history at the time he wrote his treatise :-) More seriously, I suspect something like Hume's Treatise, as it is printed, would not be taken seriously today due to it's woeful lack of proper citations.
This is a fantastic read, beautifully written (apparently the author is the older sister of Adam Gropnik, writer extraordinaire for The New Yorker).
I'm in the middle of it; but this statement is inaccurate:
> For a long time, the conventional wisdom was that the Jesuits were retrograde enforcers of orthodoxy.
I don't know what time or wisdom the author is talking about, but the whole jesuit problem has always been that they were "avant garde", not retrograde; they were the hippies of the Catholic church, or maybe more accurately the hipsters.
Not only in matters of science, as the rest of the paragraph makes clear, but in matters of faith and dogma. They were on the opposite side to tradition. That's a very well and thoroughly documented fact.
I think its more complicated. The Jesuits never felt threatened or afraid of new knowledge or science or theological insights, and various popes have had to rein in certain theological innovations. But during that period they did spearhead the counter-reformation.
As seen from the protestant point of view, Jesuits can appear "orthodox" because they are very knowledgeable, etc. and determined; but inside the Catholic world, they were perceived to be "leftists", so to speak.
Traditionalists vigorously opposed them. Among the reasons: they argued it was ok to receive communion five times a year...! (instead of just one).
The history of the Catholic church is a fight between modernists (Jesuists among them) and "orthodox heresies" (not an oxymoron!) -- in the end, modernists always win (see Vatican II, the new Pope Francis, etc.)
Very nice quote. I'm not quite middle aged, but I feel like I'm already in that vein and it annoys me to no end. Nice enough house, job, family, kids, schools, car, etc and no real passion right now to step it up a notch, or any idea how to draw more pleasure from the things and relationships I already have.
I think the only thing I really want now is for my yard to look better. When I have free time I landscape, which would have confused the hell out of my 21 year old self.
Do you like who you are for the most part and is your family happy and taken care of? Then it's not really a problem. You've got kids, a lot of people slow down a bit in their wantings at that point as they raise and care for them. As they start moving out of the house you and your wife will have more time and resources to spend on yourselves and each other.
Yeah, my family is happy and has everything they need and I'm content and mostly am happy with where my life is, but I just don't feel like I'm working toward anything anymore.
Are you seeing a doctor or counselor for your depression? Talking things out with someone else, and counseling approaches like CBT can help quite a bit. Sometimes when I've been stuck in life and depressed, I've found that my internal dialogue is poorly structured and often circular or stuck in a negative spiral.
Talking to someone else, a friend, a stranger, a counselor, helped me sound out the ideas and often find my way forward and out of my rut.
I've found that talking and thinking about it makes it worse.
Most people who are happy just are and when they try to explain to you why you should be happy too they quickly run out of meaningful or convincing things to say. Ends up further reinforcing the feeling that it's all pointless.
Happiness is a state of mind, which does not rest much on actual physical haves or haves not.
Of course, it's easier to be happy if you're young, rich and healthy than poor, sick and dying, but it's amazing how people of comparable situations have a very different outlook on life.
The key to happiness is this: you get to decide if you're happy or not.
>The key to happiness is this: you get to decide if you're happy or not.
Let's be realistic: this is not fully true, you do not have full control over yourself. Some may need external help and should seek it.
But certainly it's at least partially true. Realize that both happiness and sadness are irrational feelings which emerge from our subconscious. Your rational self can influence them to some degree with knowledge and effort. Listen to the advice from the experience of others: go outside, exercise, socialize. Find something you enjoy doing and do it.
The last line is really true with regards to happiness. Unfortunately, you have to be in the right place, mentally, in order to really appreciate it.
You can take it to mean: I'll be happy where I am, or I'm happy making these changes to get to whatever. Whichever helps right now is ok.
But, to me, the key to happiness in being happy in the now. Not the tomorrow. Not the yesterday. One hack that makes this easier is to be more thankful.
Anyway, you should probably be taking vitamin D supplements (especially if you are pigmented). Definitely helped me.
You can 'decide' to be happy, but you give youself a better chance if you aren't chemically at the correct balance.
It may depend on the kind of depression/situation, but I tend to agree. Meds can help you feel better initially, but the important thing to think and plan about is how to break the vicious circle. Explore some place you weren't, talk to strangers, lose stereotype, lose yourself.
There are many, many couples struggling in relationships who have a kid hoping it'll fix it. Instead, they break apart anyways, and now there's a kid who suffers as well.
"When you're young, you want things you are told you want. When you get(or lose) those things, you want to figure out what you really want. Because you are still(always?) unfulfilled."
Admit I'm biased against Hume. Something about his Hard Scot style that left me as clammy as his pronouncement that "man was no more significant to the universe than an oyster."
For me, it remains Descartes Ontological Argument that provided the philosophical lantern in our collective cave of existential darkness. And I still see echoes of its pure logic and simplicity reverberating into the present. In Boltzmann Brains. In the intersections of quantum information theory and thermodynamics. Yes, even in the realms of design thinking, creativity and startup engineering...
I, too, felt the dismisal and the return to mere experience was superficial. Experience would not be possible without an ontological grounding. Just because you ignore it, does not make anything better. You feel better about yourself? Cool, but don't pretend metaphysics is useless. On the real side of things, the dismissal of metaphysics, especially in relation to ethics, has lead to moral relativism and nihilism.
I don't think people get better or feel good because they found an idea in a book. Humans love humans. Humans help humans be happy. She found happiness in another person, not in Hume. This, I think, it's just a post-rationalisation. Sounds cool, but it's not what really happens. In general. Cool ideas create an excitement that lasts only so long.
I think you're reading it slightly the wrong way. She wasn't necessarily saying the ideas helped her get through her mid-life crisis. It was getting interested in the link between Hume and buddhism that gave her a new purpose, and ultimately allowed her to meet her husband. So it is in that sense that Hume helped get her out of her mid-life crisis.
Interesting, I didn't see that. I'll read again. But if you're right, then it is not that interesting. :) Anyways, I think that the real good in her life was finding someone to love.
But a natural consequence of thinking about concepts such as entropy and chaos is the emergence of the idea of perfection. A single-atomic layer, defect free crystal of graphene for example. And the fact that we can conceive of and perhaps even strive toward perfection has always seemed "suggestive" to me.
The curiosity for the reason behind things, the drive of rationalism, the human sense of awe are not the monopoly of religion.
Although a rationalist, a-religious, myself, I always liked Hume because he pushed empiricism to its logical limits. As Kant acknowledged, he woke us up from our dogmatic sleep.
I always understood "I think, therefore I am" to mean that you have the power over your own destiny, like if I wanted to be a professor I could totally become one, think like one, act like one etc.
I just reread it in this article and realized it means if I have the ability to observe myself, I must exist.
"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...Desideri accepted the challenge. He spent the next five years in the Buddhist monasteries tucked away in the mountains around Lhasa. The monasteries were among the largest academic institutions in the world at the time. Desideri embarked on their 12-year-long curriculum in theology and philosophy. He composed a series of Christian tracts in Tibetan verse, which he presented to the king. They were beautifully written on the scrolls used by the great Tibetan libraries, with elegant lettering and carved wooden cases...He also translated the work of the great Buddhist philosopher Tsongkhapa into Italian. In his book, Desideri describes Tibetan Buddhism in great and accurate detail, especially in one volume titled “Of the False and Peculiar Religion Observed in Tibet.” He explains emptiness, karma, reincarnation, and meditation, and he talks about the Buddhist denial of the self...Desideri overcame Himalayan blizzards, mountain torrents, and war. But bureaucratic infighting got him in the end. Rival missionaries, the Capuchins, were struggling bitterly with the Jesuits over evangelical turf, and they claimed Tibet for themselves. Michelangelo Tamburini, the head of the Jesuits, ordered Desideri to return to Europe immediately, until the territory dispute was settled. The letter took two years to reach Tibet, but once it arrived, in 1721, Desideri had no choice. He had to leave. He spent the next 11 years writing and rewriting his book and appealing desperately to the Vatican to let him return to Tibet. It had clearly become the only place where he really felt that he was himself. In 1732 the authorities finally ruled—in favor of the Capuchins. His book would not be published and he could never return. He died four months later."
How truly awful. He mastered Tibetan, spent decades studying the profoundest and subtlest Buddhist philosophy with great success, wrote it all up for the Europeans back home whose understanding was de minimis, and from reading old books I could well credit that his work was superior to anything published until 1900 (or perhaps later) - implying the Catholic Church singlehandedly set back understanding by over 179 years, for reasons that strike one as either incompetent or psychopathicly malicious.
And this is just the summary by Gopnik, who is trying to paint the Catholic Church in as positive, tolerant, and globalizing a way as possible!
Gopnick does mention European contact with Chinese philosophy and theology in the paper that hownottowrite linked, however this is dismissed as a contact point for Buddhism: "European scholars in the Chinese court focused on the elite Confucian and Taoist traditions."
It is my understanding that Leibniz was mostly exposed to the Confucian tradition, his correspondences with Joachim Bouvet on this topic are mentioned in the paper.
Yeah, she writes a sentence about this theme. That actually instead of thinking person A could only learn about topic X if they were in situation S - that historians are now thinking that, like today, information and ideas were exchanged across the continents much more fluidly.
Trade, knowledge, farmers, ideas, technology - we've been exchanging ideas since we have been able to move about. I find the idea really exciting in a way - almost as if Internet is completely human and a natural extension of what people have been doing since cave times - communicating!
I found it more Bolaño than anything. 2666 is an awesome book that parallels academic research and a journey of the self, in many way similar to the OP's account.
The article was an entertaining read. However, it contains a few errors.
First, Spinoza was not an atheist. He was a pantheist. He identified nature/universe with God and tried to overcome the infamous "mind"/matter duality posed by Descartes by claiming that both were but aspects of the infinite substance, namely, God. That is, he subscribed to a certain panpsychism. Comparisons to Buddhism are actually very superficial. Other attempts at surmounting Cartesian dualism included Malbranche's occasionalism which claimed that God was the bridge between the two (there is a humorous anecdote that on his deathbed he was asked what good the world is if God was the cause of our ideas, after which he purportedly sighed in realization and died).
Second, I don't know what it is about Hume, but he seems to be quite popular among those with little philosophical background...which would be fine if there were some humility attached to the enthusiasm. Hume is notorious for misunderstanding Aristotle, never having read his works, and relied instead on mediocre secondary sources. Furthermore, (his) skepticism is self-defeating and incoherent. I found a good link that describes some of the objections for those who are interested: http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2009/06/hume-science-and-rel...
Third - and this is more of an observation - Buddhism, and perhaps especially of the ostensibly Tibetan Californian variety, seems to be one of those dying fads in some aging academic circles who hadn't yet properly digested it or moved on to some other colorful New Age Americanism (popular adoration for the Dalai Lama has always been incomprehensible to me; most who do haven't the slightest idea of whom they're adoring). Lhasa is far enough from the West that envisioning it as a sort of Shangri-La where all of the nastiness of the West is absent. It's kind of a secular New Jerusalem or Promised Land (the truth about Tibetan theocracy isn't quite so pretty). To her credit, the author admits the first bit.
Fourth - another observation - the Jesuits seem to be a kind of least hated order in the Catholic Church among atheists because of certain perceptions I won't elaborate here. These perceptions seem to stem from a certain Enlightenment inheritance that portrayed the Catholic Church as a stale, largely monolithic institution wallowing in superstition and unilaterally bent on destroying Science-with-a-Big-S and keeping people ignorant. Many accusation are outright fabrications or comic book worthy oversimplification that never seem to get checked by armchair historians (e.g., the Galileo affair) because the vilification of imaginary enemies is too juicy to rectify. Whatever apprehensions one might have about the faith, it is important to remember that history requires proper interpretation by keeping in mind the times and a sample of the relevant facts. For instance, if a medieval king punishes a vociferous heretic (most were clergymen, btw) by imprisoning him, we must try to understand the historical context. Was it a merciful punishment for that time period? Why was heresy seen as a threat exactly (no facile answers, please)? What did it mean to have your book placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (hint: probably not what you think if what you think is the stock answer of reactionary anti-Catholics)? I mention these consideration to inspire a search for a deeper understanding of the actual nature of such things...for those who can and dare.
tl;dr Hume could have been influenced by Buddhism but we don't know, and the search to find out inspired this person to be passionate about something and in the process learned to enjoy life again
You missed the part about re-examining the cross-currents of knowledge between the East and West. I like the analogy of it being an early (and much slower) version of the internet. Ideas are not formed in a vacuum.
Again as a transhumanist, I would urge everyone to consider the sad reality that the biggest reason, in recent decades, we haven't cheated death yet is the pro-aging trance of 99.99% of humanity.
In blunt terms, you don't get to complain about midlife crisis and meaning of life, and be offended by the suggestion of healthful longevity research (e.g., along SENS lines), at the same time. (NOTE: not saying achievement of healthful longevity will solve all your problems, but cutting out the discussion of an option is not helping either).
Even if we completely solve aging as a physiological phenomenon, we will still have to consider aging as a social one. In fact, we may have to understand aging better, not worse.
What does it mean when you're 70 and have spent the first 50 years in a relationship that dissolves? Does that change whether you're in the body of a 70 or a 20 year old?
Further, accepting the current reality of aging does not mean that the same people are offended by longevity research. These are unrelated issues.
I love the theme of how discovery and research are the source of both melancholy and ecstasy. Gopnik herself seems to have found fulfillment and an escape from other troubles in the exciting new questions she encountered about Hume's influences. The other side of the same coin is Hume's depression during the period when he found himself incapable of making significant progress on his thesis.
> "When you’re young, you want things: work, love, children. When you reach middle age, you want to want things. When you’re depressed, you no longer want anything. Desire, hope, the future itself—all seem to vanish, as they had for me. But now I at least wanted to know whether Hume could have heard about Desideri. It was a sign that my future might return."
The other theme of interest to the tech community is the interplay of personal and professional lives. If you consider the two aspects of one's life, personal relationships and professional fulfillment, each provides a hedge against possible problems with the other. Interesting explorations in one's work can help pull one from other problems in life.
There is a significant time-varying component of probabilistic luck in whether one's life and work will be fulfilling, but I think it makes sense to constantly strive to bias these probabilities towards outcomes that involve working on exciting projects and building meaningful personal relationships.
I think this article is a strong descriptive companion to Zach Weinersmith's popular comic about 'eleven lifetimes' http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2722