[This is one of
twenty-one essays in the book Man and the Divine, published in
August 2018. The book is available in ePub format from leading retailers of
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The Enlightenment agenda of the eighteenth century is based
on the premise that human beings are rational beings in a causal world, which can be understood by the power of
mathematics, physics, and the other sciences and disciplines which are based on
human reason. The power of reason, it was assumed, is necessarily more powerful
than all other forces which may exist in the world, and in the human mind. If
this assumption was correct, then it should be possible not only to detect and
defeat what is irrational in the world, but to eliminate its presence altogether.
At least for all practical purposes.
The prioritization of the power of reason in the eighteenth
century was based on a disdain for many (even most) of the elements of human
experience throughout the thousands of years in which we lived in a quite
different world. That world was full of darkness and ignorance, built on the basis
of faulty ideas and associations; on mythopoeic patterns of thought, utilising
groundless notions of the powers in nature. A world peopled by gods who needed
to be appeased, and who could be propitiated by ritual human action; full of
magical thinking, with demons and devils lurking at every turn.
According to this view, there was no reason in the world,
until the emergence of classical civilisation in southern Europe in the middle
years of the first millennium B.C.E.
I have cast doubt on this picture elsewhere. Yet there are
elements of truth to it.
The Enlightenment agenda was developed in the context of a
new understanding of the critical power of human thought, and also of the
sciences. Newton showed that causality was the key to our world, and
mathematics was the necessary toolkit for gaining an understanding of how the
universe works. Without Newton’s demonstration that mathematics could be
deployed to describe the motions of the Moon and the planets, and the
phenomenon of gravity as a universal force in the cosmos, it is doubtful that
the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century would have had the character it
had.
The Enlightenment engagement with the visible and physical
reality of the universe depended on an intelligible order present in the world,
expressed in terms of causal relationships, and that man could frame his
relationship with that ordered reality through mathematical and scientific inquiry.
In which case, the development of the sciences was effectively the deployment
of the human reason, carrying with it no baggage from the past which might skew
our understanding. Religion and theology had no place in this new dispensation,
despite the fact that Newton spent much of his time engaged with religious
questions (a fact almost entirely unknown during the Enlightenment). It seemed
obvious that there was no meaningful order in religion, which was now thought
of in terms of the chief species of superstition. There was also no basis for
believing in the reality of the divine, and no way in which the idea could
survive scientific scrutiny.
The French writer Denis Diderot, and many others, considered
that human reason could order human life on the basis of the nature of reason
itself. We didn’t need any of the things which now were deemed to be
superstition or without any aspect of reason, which included many of the
customary arrangements and practices in human society. In effect, the whole of
the long history of civilisation became, to the savants of the Enlightenment, a
sojourn in a world of stupidity and horror. The Enlightenment would build the
world anew from scratch, and it would be about the improvement of the physical
and intellectual condition of the human race.
This is the background to Diderot’s Encyclopedia – it
reflected the new understanding of the world, and the principles on which the
new world would be built. Diderot made an exception for the crafts and trades.
In addition to the intellectual life of man, the organisation of societal and
customary relations in human life, the crafts were part of the fabric of living
and understanding. Swathes of the crafts and trades might once have been
wrapped up in elements of folklore and superstition, and from the earliest
times, but their practicality was what was important. So the crafts could be
stripped of their ancient accretions and described and defined anew, as what they
were in terms of their contribution to human life.
In short, the achievement of a wholly secular enlightenment,
which is what the enterprise of the European Enlightenment was all about, required
the thorough redefinition of the past, and what the elements of that past
meant. The improved state of man required a wholesale rewriting of human
intellectual and social history. Old ideas would end their days on the
scrapheap.
In Scotland (although the enterprise began in France), Hume’s
contribution to the Enlightenment was rather different. Hume considered the idea that important
aspects of the human reason could be understood by the introduction of the
experimental method (as he understood it) into psychological subjects. He was essentially experimenting on himself, and exploring the scope and
possibilities of his own thoughts. Whereas Diderot’s enterprise was to reshape
the world in terms of a rational understanding of how things work, Hume was revising
and rebuilding himself in terms of how the rational mind works.
Though Hume's approach was not wholly successful, some of his intuitions expanded our collective
understanding of how we perceive reality – for example, his insight that we have no actual knowledge
of the process of causation at all, and only a customary expectation of causal
process, was a powerful one. We can describe causal processes, we can
differentiate the nature of different causal processes, and we can formulate
rules in connection with them, but we cannot know how causality itself
operates, or even be sure that a perceived causal relation, often observed
before, will obey the implicit rule the next time it is under scrutiny by us.
However, it is no longer clear that Hume was exploring his
mental processes and understanding entirely within the framework of western
secular thought, which is what the European Enlightenment was supposed to be
about. In 2009 Alison Gopnik published an article in Hume Studies (Volume 35, Number 1 & 2, 2009 pp.
5-28) which suggested that Hume may have had an important encounter with
Buddhist thought while residing and writing at La Flèche in France. Gopnik also
wrote engagingly about her research (and its context) later on in an article in
the Atlantic magazine (October 2015 issue).
This is the abstract for the article published in Hume
Studies:
Philosophers and Buddhist scholars have noted the
affinities between David Hume's empiricism and the Buddhist philosophical
tradition. I show that it was possible for Hume to have had contact with
Buddhist philosophical views. The link to Buddhism comes through the Jesuit
scholars at the Royal College of La Flèche. Charles François Dolu was a Jesuit
missionary who lived at the Royal College from 1723-1740, overlapping with
Hume's stay. He had extensive knowledge both of other religions and cultures
and of scientific ideas. Dolu had had first-hand experience with Theravara
Buddhism as part of the second French embassy to Siam in 1687-1688. In 1727,
Dolu also had talked with Ippolito Desideri, a Jesuit missionary who visited
Tibet and made an extensive study of Tibetan Buddhism from 1716-1721. It is at
least possible that Hume heard about Buddhist ideas through Dolu.
What is Theravara Buddhism? Theravara
is a Pali word, with the literal meaning of the ‘school of the elder monks’. There is a Pali Canon of the teaching of the
Buddha, and Theravara Buddhism uses those teachings as the basis of its
doctrines. Theravara Buddhism is
conservative in doctrine and in matters of monastic discipline. There is no
other complete Buddhist canon of teachings surviving in a classic Indic
language.
The sect originated in Sri
Lanka, but is now found in many places around the whole of Southeast Asia.
Theravara Buddhism has some interesting ideas about the
nature of causality (Pratītyasamutpāda). Causality, or the idea of cause
and effect, is one of the most important ideas in Buddhism as a whole, as well
as to the Theravara branch. It differs from western notions of causality, in
that it understands cause and effect in terms of ‘dependent co-arising’ (which
is what Pratītyasamutpāda means).
In the Pali Canon, a differentiation is made between ideas of ‘root cause’
(hetu), and ‘facilitating cause’ (pacca). Effects are brought about by a
combined interaction of these two causes. Much of the logic of Buddhism is
based on this view of causality.
The significance of
this is that it provides explanation of the nature of suffering, and provides
an understanding of how suffering may be escaped. This notion of causality also
provides an obstacle to patterns of thought which argue for absolute and
unquestionable beliefs concerning reality itself. The understanding is that the
removal of a cause of something, will also remove the result. The logic of this
way of looking at causality is that there is a path which can end both suffering
and aimless existence (Samsara, which term can mean ‘wandering’ or ‘world’).
This is of course a very different conception of causality
from the one we understand in the west. And it is an old idea. That cause
produces an effect because a property belongs to something (svadha) appears in
Vedic literature, which takes the idea back to the 2nd Millennium
B.C.E., and is found in the Rigveda
and the Brahmanas. Pratītyasamutpāda
doctrine is more complex however,
since it does not involve a single causality. The doctrine involves instead an
indirect conditioned causality, and a plural causality.
Hume’s famous image
of our understanding of causality is of billiard balls, and how their behaviour
can be predicted. This is the Newtonian model of causality. Hume’s insight was
that though we could describe and predict their behaviour, we had no idea what
was actually behind the behaviour on the billiard table. We know how they
behaved a year ago. And how they behaved a week ago. But we have nothing but
customary experience to indicate that the same behaviour will happen today.
In Buddhism, the
concept of causality implies a plurality of causes which co-originate
phenomena. So one thing implies another. This is the basis of the idea of
Karma, where the causes can co-originate phenomena both within lifetimes, and
across lifetimes. So, what happens in one life can create the necessary
conditions which may result in rebirth in another realm of existence for a
different lifetime. This is based on the idea of a ‘dependent co-arising’
Peter Harvey argued
in 1990 that Pratītyasamutpāda is an ontological principle.
Meaning that it is a theory which can provide an explanation for ‘the nature
and relations of being, becoming, existence and ultimate reality’. All that
stands by itself is the state of Nirvana. Everything which has existence and
multiplicity does not not stand alone, but depends on and arises from
pre-existing states. When they cease, other dependent states arise. It does not
matter whether we are talking about physical or mental states. ‘Dependent
arisings’ therefore have a causal conditioning. In which case, Pratītyasamutpāda
is the basis of the Buddhist understanding of the nature of reality itself. It
is Buddhism’s ontology.
So dependent
origination is deemed necessary and sufficient according to the principle of
Pratītyasamutpāda. In Majjhima Nikaya this idea is
expressed as follows:
When this is, that is; This arising, that arises; When this is not, that is not; This ceasing, that ceases.
If Hume had discussions with the Jesuits at La Flèche
about Buddhist ideas concerning the nature of reality, he may well have encountered
Buddhist views on the nature of causality. In which case, his observation of
the unfathomability of the nature of causal relations becomes extremely
interesting. He may have understood that
the Buddhist view of causality is an ontological one, in that it understands
the nature of causality in terms of ‘this being so, that being so’, and does
not require the concept of a creator god, a transcendent creative principle, or
the notion of a first cause of any kind. This kind of concept of causality
refers to conditions created by a plurality of causes that necessarily
co-originate phenomena. It is what happens when you do not simply have the one
thing, but a multiplicity of entities, which have properties of their own.
So it is possible that Hume’s lack of interest in Plato (he
wrote one page about Plato in his volume of Essays), does not mean he had no substantial interest in ontological questions, but perhaps that he understood ontology to
be a matter of causality, rather than a transcendent creative principle, about
which we might be able to say very little. This does not make Hume a Buddhist
by any means, and I am not suggesting that he was. But it does suggest the
possibility that there is a hinterland of Hume’s thought and influences still
to be explored.
Are there obvious parallelisms between Hume’s thought and
Theravara Buddhism? ‘Dependent arisings’ with causal conditioning, of
course, need to be established and understood if suffering is to be avoided. In
Buddhism, this becomes a key function of scholarship and the priesthood. If
there is some condition or state which is unwanted, that state is caused by the
pre-existence of something else, and to alter that state involves the removal
of the thing which pre-exists. This opens up a whole realm for speculation
about ‘why this is so’, and ‘why this is not so’, using the concepts of root cause,
and facilitating causes. It is also a way of understanding which is necessarily
conjectural in approach, inimical to any belief system which has a fixed
mindset, or postulates absolute beliefs about the nature of reality. Within
such an intellectual model of how things are related, things can be conjectured
to be the case, but relationships can also be analysed, and disputed. So
Theravara Buddhism has a form of scepticism built in to the way it deals with
reality (the schisms in early Buddhism point to this characteristic very
strongly).
Which is where we find the intellectual outlook of Hume.
Sceptical, with no absolute beliefs about the nature of reality. Prepared to
inquire into the limits of human understanding, but not to attach himself to
any thought which has not been critically examined, and which, even so, must always
and necessarily remain a matter of conjecture.
TY, December 26 2016. Some unfortunate typos corrected, April 2, 2018.
