How David Hume Helped Solve My Midlife Crisis

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

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"

http://www.alisongopnik.com/papers_alison/gopnik_humestudies...

For more information on Ippolito Desideri and his life in Tibet:

"Mission to Tibet: The Extraordinary Eighteenth-Century Account of Father Ippolito Desideri S. J." 832 pages

http://www.wisdompubs.org/book/mission-tibet

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.

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.

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.

It makes me wonder about the history of citations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_citation

Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature: http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/342

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.

Thank you for sharing, i found this a very inspiring read. It really resonated with me! I have nothing intelligent to add to the conversation, though.

I just heard the author on Philosophy Bites (a podcast). Absolutely marvelous episode, I was genuinely surprised by her findings:

http://philosophybites.com/2013/09/alison-gopnik-on-hume-and...

Nice writing.

"When you’re young, you want things: work, love, children. When you reach middle age, you want to want things."

Irked by author's facile dismissal of Descartes.

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...

Actually, she needn't have looked so far afield. Leibniz lived just before Hume, and he was well versed in Buddhist philosophy.

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.

Great read. Europeans have been aware of Buddhism since 300 BC though - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greco-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...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!

In the past, did people carry all their "travel money" on their person when taking long trips? What would happen if they were looted?

Actually, Gopnik needn't have looked so far afield. Leibniz lived just before Hume, and he was well versed in Chinese buddhist philosophy.

So, does this mean that cognitive 'science' and psychiatric drugs are not the solution? Who would have known /s

This was one of the best things I have read in a while. Thank you OP.

Strong notes of Pynchon!

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

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).