We discovered the entries in the Jesuit catalogs that listed everyone who lived at the Royal College in 1726, 1734, and 1737: some 100 teachers, students, and servants in all. Twelve Jesuit fathers had been at La Flèche when Desideri visited and were still there when Hume arrived. So Hume had lots of opportunities to learn about Desideri.
One name stood out: P. Charles François Dolu, a missionary in the Indies. This had to be the Père Tolu I had been looking for; the “Tolu” in Petech’s book was a transcription error. Dolu not only had been particularly interested in Desideri; he was also there for all of Hume’s stay. And he had spent time in the East. Could he be the missing link?
...
We discovered that in the 1730s not one but two Europeans had experienced Buddhism firsthand, and both of them had been at the Royal College. Desideri was the first, and the second was Dolu. He had been part of another fascinating voyage to the East: the French embassy to Buddhist Siam.
In the 1680s, King Narai of Siam became interested in Christianity, and even more interested in European science, especially astronomy. Louis XIV dispatched two embassies to Siam, in 1685 and 1687, including a strong contingent of Jesuit scientists. Dolu was part of the 1687 group.
The Jesuits in the 1687 embassy, including Dolu, stayed in Siam for a year and spent a great deal of time with the talapoins—the European word for the Siamese Buddhist monks. Three of them even lived in the Buddhist monastery and followed its rules.
Like Desideri’s mission, the Siamese embassy ended in bloodshed and chaos. In 1688 the local courtiers and priests revolted against the liberal king and his arrogant foreign advisers. They assassinated King Narai, the new bridge between the two cultures crumbled, and the Jesuits fled for their lives. Several of them died. Dolu and a few others escaped to Pondicherry, in India, where they set up a Jesuit church.
In 1723, after his extraordinarily eventful and exotic career, Dolu retired to peaceful La Flèche for the rest of his long life. He was 80 when Hume arrived, the last surviving member of the embassies, and a relic of the great age of Jesuit science.
...
And I discovered something else. Hume had said that Pierre Bayle’s Historical and Critical Dictionary was an important influence on the Treatise—particularly the entry on Spinoza. So I looked up that entry in the dictionary, which is a brilliant, encyclopedic, 6 million–word mess of footnotes, footnotes to footnotes, references, and cross-references. One of the footnotes in the Spinoza entry was about “oriental philosophers” who, like Spinoza, denied the existence of God and argued for “emptiness.” And it cross-referenced another entry about the monks of Siam, as described by the Jesuit ambassadors. Hume must have been reading about Buddhism, and Dolu’s journey, in the very building where Dolu lived.--Alison Gopnik "How an 18th-Century Philosopher Helped Solve My Midlife Crisis: David Hume, the Buddha, and a search for the Eastern roots of the Western Enlightenment" in The Atlantic.
Alison Gopnik's interest in the connection between Hume and Buddhism (
see also this scholarly piece), alongside
Dario Perinetti's research on the library at the College of La Flèche (known to Descartes and Hume scholars), is leading to a revolution in Hume scholarship. Here I want to offer a glimpse of the significance of their work.
After professional philosophers (influenced by Ted McGuire, Howard Stein, Bill Harper, Mary Hesse, George Smith, etc.) renewed the interest in the historical Newton, it became pretty obvious that Book 1 of Hume's Treatise is, despite the relentless coupling of Hume & Newton in post-Kantian philosophy, not very Newtonian. This pushed an unpleasant choice on Hume scholars: either Hume did not understand Newton or he is an informed critic of Newton.
Reservations about Newton are hard to find in Scotland in the 1730s, but what's key is that opposition to Newton in France only died down from 1739 onwards after Maupertuis showed that the figure of the earth was pretty much as Newton predicted it based on the law of gravitation. (This has been discussed by
Kofi Maglo,
Mary Terrall, and
JB Shank).
Now, philosophers, influenced by Kant and
Koyré, like to suggest that the opposition to Newton was primarily methodological and metaphysical (muttering things about un-intelligibility of action at a distance). Undoubtedly such issues played a role.
But as George Smith and I have shown, in his (1690) Discourse on Gravity, Huygens had also offered an extremely influential empirical argument against Newton's theory. There are many steps that go into Huygens's argument, but, crucially, Huygens's argument relies on
(i) measurements with pendulums, especially the second pendulum going back to Tachard, Varin, and others; (ii) measurements of longitude on land, including, crucially one by Tachard. In 1685 Father Guy Tachard, a Jesuit, on his way to Siam, had established the longitude of the Cape of Good Hope, relative to Paris, by comparing the time of an eclipse of the innermost moon of Jupiter with the time predicted by Gian Domenico Cassini's tables; (iii) measurements of longitude at sea with Huygens's pendulum clock.
The key for present purposes is this. When Hume came to La Flèche, the last living astronomer personally familiar with Tachard's measurements and what they entailed about the empirical arguments against Newton's theory was was Father Dolu (who, presumably, had a hand in some of these measurements). That is to say, when Hume came to La Flèche he encountered worldly Jesuits who had been at the cutting edge of empirical science -- even big science --, doing measurements and research that spanned the globe. Dolu could have given him a new scene of thought that liberated him from the narrow and insular confines of Scotland and given him confidence to shake the authority of Newtonian natural philosophy (and the Newtonian natural religion it supported).
As it happens, as Hume was writing the
Treatise, new expeditions to Peru and Lapland (even bigger science) were producing results that would undermine the status of these late 17th century measurements. Hume will not be the last philosopher who bases his philosophy on an empirical science that is out of date (
as Russell recognized) by the time his/her book is appreciated by discerning readers.
Eric, I agree that Hume's account of space and ideas of space is in part aimed at Newton's conception of absolute space. But it is equally aimed at the Cartesians and Descartes's evacuated chamber argument for a substantive plenum. Hume thinks he is devising a clever relationist middle way way between Newtonianism and Cartesianism with respect to space and extension. And I agree that Hume is critical of Newton and Newtonianism in important additional ways - especially, as you have argued, in his general appraisal of the ultimate utility of Newtonian natural philosophy, at least in comparison with moral science. Nevertheless, I continue to think that Hume does see himself as carrying Newton's method into the moral sciences, and believes the wide general acclaim for that method (at least insofar as he understands it) is entirely justified. He believes he is out-Newtoning Newton, though, in (i) not making Newton's "mistake" of adopting absolute space, which Hume mistakenly thinks is an extraneous metaphysical hypothesis unsupported by empirical proofs, and thus itself a violation of Newtonian method; and (ii) not wasting his time on natural philosophy, which Hume seems to think - now we would have to say thinks somewhat sadly, laughably - is a cultural ornament lacking in practical utility.
Posted by: Dan Kervick | 08/31/2016 at 01:04 AM
Dan, undoubtedly we disagree about some non-trivial details on the Hume/Newton relationship, including the ways his empirical methods are Newtonian or out-Newtoning Newton. But here I would just note that your (ii) is key to what the revisionary literature on Hume aimed to show; and if recognition of your (ii) becomes common sense in scholarship I would be very pleased.
Posted by: Eric Schliesser | 08/31/2016 at 01:11 AM
I actually don't think we disagree on very much Eric. I agree that there are some real problems with seeing Hume's methods as "Newtonian." For one thing, I think Hume thought a proper method for moral science as theory was to establish and be guided by "general rules" or "maxims" that might be retained and employed even after being found to be subject to some exceptions.
But I nevertheless think it is important that Hume tended to *think* his methods were Newtonian. So as for that part of the traditional view that saw Hume as aspiring to be the second Newton of the moral sciences, I think we can say that part is still intact.
The role of (ii) above is very interesting. I'm not sure we can say it is a revision, per se, to the previous interpretations - but only because those previous interpretations don't seem to have taken much interest in the question of what Hume thought natural philosophy was (or was not) good for. Nevertheless, your work pointed me toward looking at that question, and it was rather startling for me to realize how little appreciation Hume seems to have had of the developing interrelationships between natural science and technological progress, a burgeoning intellectual industry that was already in his time on the cusp of producing revolutionary change in the material conditions of life.
Posted by: Dan Kervick | 08/31/2016 at 04:12 AM