How David Hume Helped Solve My Midlife Crisis

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/10/how-david-hume-helped-me-solve-my-midlife-crisis/403195/?single_page=true

by hownottowrite • 11 years ago

259 84 11 years ago

theatlantic.com

hownottowrite• 11 years ago

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

toothbrush• 11 years ago

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.

mattchew• 11 years ago

Nice writing.

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

aianus3• 11 years ago

I'm 24 and I've already run out of things to want =/

gohrt• 11 years ago

get some kids; they'll keep you busy.

strictnein2• 11 years ago

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.

Jtsummers3• 11 years ago

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.

yason• 11 years ago

I might say, though, myself: "When you're young, you think you want things. When you reach middle age, you want to think what you want."

mildbow2• 11 years ago

I like it.

For myself it's a little like this:

"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."

peterwwillis2• 11 years ago

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

ThomPete• 11 years ago

That is selling this essay short on so many levels it's not even funny.

peterwwillis2• 11 years ago

tl;dr means too long didn't read

mjrpes• 11 years ago

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.

shas3• 11 years ago

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

pogimabus• 11 years ago

"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.

Age really doesn't have anything to do with it.

angrycoder• 11 years ago

So you are only 'normal' when you want things? That is a really strange world view.

javert• 11 years ago

Thanks, good observation.

aridiculous• 11 years ago

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...

atlantic2• 11 years ago

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

atlantic2• 11 years ago

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

hcs• 11 years ago

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.

chippy2• 11 years ago

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!

fizixer• 11 years ago

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).

ebiester• 11 years ago

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.

UhUhUhUh• 11 years ago

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.

eliben• 11 years ago

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.

sridca2• 11 years ago

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?

eli_gottlieb3• 11 years ago

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?

Well yes, but then everyone calls you a loser. http://www.theonion.com/article/unambitious-loser-with-happy...

lighthawk• 11 years ago

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.

keithpeter• 11 years ago

A quote from the Enquiry

"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...

paganel• 11 years ago

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

hsitz• 11 years ago

"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.

ola• 11 years ago

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.”

IkmoIkmo• 11 years ago

God that hit home harder than anything I've ever read.

bambax4• 11 years ago

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.

JackFr• 11 years ago

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.

bambax4• 11 years ago

It is complicated, yes.

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.)

heurist• 11 years ago

Strong notes of Pynchon!

ojosilva• 11 years ago

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.

jhallenworld2• 11 years ago

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

336f5• 11 years ago

"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!

fitzwatermellow2• 11 years ago

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...

cortesoft• 11 years ago

Wait... Are you saying that you find Descartes' Ontological Argument persuasive?

fitzwatermellow2• 11 years ago

As definitive "proof" of God's existence? No..

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.

cristianpascu2• 11 years ago

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.

Digit-Al• 11 years ago

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.

dharma1• 11 years ago

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

scott_karana2• 11 years ago

More than that, I love that the "traditional" Asian Buddha statue is in fact directly descended from Greek schools of sculpture who did him first. :-)

EC1• 11 years ago

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.

raverbashing• 11 years ago

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

hippo8• 11 years ago

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

hackaflocka• 11 years ago

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

bobthechef• 11 years ago

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.

How David Hume Helped Solve My Midlife Crisis

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