Hume as a Western Mādhyamika: The Case from Ethics

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Descriptionངོ་སྤྲོད།

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I am not the only person to have argued that Hume is a kind of Western Mādhyamika (Garfield 1990, 2011, 2015). And indeed, in teaching Hume at Tibetan universities in India, I have found that Tibetan scholars instantly recognize him as a kind of Mādhyamika, even if they are not sure that there is a ready-made grub 'mtha (doxographic) box within that camp into which to fit him. Most of the grounds for this classification are metaphysical, concerning Hume’s accounts of causation, the nature of personal identity and his account of the construction of the idea of external objects, each of which is strongly redolent of the thought of Candrakīrti, although with hints of Bhāvaviveka as well.[1]
       Alison Gopnik has recently argued that this is no accident of history (Gopnik 2010). She points out that Hume was resident at La Flèche Abbey at precisely the time that Ippolito Desideri was in residence following his remarkable sojourn in Tibet, and hypothesizes that Hume in fact borrowed all of his apparently Buddhist ideas from Buddhism as related to him by Desideri.[2] Were this true, it would be one of the more remarkable instances of direct borrowing of Buddhist ideas by an early modern philosopher, alongside that of Leibniz's virtual plagiarism of the Huayan (Avataṃsaka) Sūtra from rough translations sent to him by his Jesuit correspondents in China.[3]
      Unfortunately, however, Gopnik's historical argument is at best tendentious. For one thing, every one of the Humean ideas that Gopnik urges is borrowed from Tibet is also present in very much the form that Hume develops it in the Western skeptical tradition, developed at length by Sextus Empiricus and reported by Bayle. We know that Hume read Bayle and Sextus with care, and so there is no reason to think that he would not simply have borrowed the arguments he advances from them. So the Tibetan hypothesis is not necessary in order to explain the phenomenon.
      For another thing, Hume, as we know, was a merciless critic of the Christian church, and particularly of Catholicism, and was more than willing to bite the hand that fed him. If he had discovered at LaFlèche that ideas he was advancing were endorsed by Buddhists—those condemned as pagan heretics by the church—he would surely have reveled in the opportunity to elevate pagan learning over Catholic doctrine. That he does not suggests strongly that he was not in fact aware of the affinities of his own ideas to those of Buddhism.
      Nonetheless, as McEvilley (2002) and Beckwith (2015) have each persuasively argued, there is something to Gopnik's claim of influence. It is just that the links in this chain are older than she imagines. There is good (but again, not demonstrative) reason, including the testimony of Diogenes Laertius, to believe that there was interaction—perhaps mediated by Alexander's campaigns, perhaps by the Persian court, perhaps in Greek Bactria—between classical Greek and Indian Buddhist philosophers. Indeed, as Beckwith argues, classical skepticism may be an Indian import to Greece. Hume sits firmly in the Western skeptical tradition and borrows not only a general Pyrrhonian outlook, but many specific Pyrrhonian dialectical tropes. So there is good reason to believe that the confluence between Humean and Buddhist insights is not accidental, even if not mediated by Desideri's time in Tibet and Hume’s sojourn in LaFlèche. (Garfield, introductory remarks, 131–32)

Notes

My Tibetan colleagues note that in certain respects—e.g. Hume's taking convention as a kind of explanatory bedrock, and his refusal to take it for granted that we always have concepts corresponding to our words—he appears to be a good thal 'gyur pa/Prāsaṅgika; but in other respects, e.g. his apparent willingness to accept some convention-independent phenomena for granted—such as impressions or events—he appears more like a rang gyud pa/Svatantrika.
See Desideri (2010) for a detailed account of Desideri's time in Tibet and fascinating observations on Buddhism.
See Liu (2002) for more on this affinity.

Citation

Garfield, Jay, L. "Hume as a Western Mādhyamika: The Case from Ethics." In Ethics without Self, Dharma without Atman: Western and Buddhist Philosophical Traditions in Dialogue, edited by Gordon F. Davis, 131–43. Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2018.

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Davis, Gordon F., ed. Ethics without Self, Dharma without Atman: Western and Buddhist Philosophical Traditions in Dialogue. Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures 24. Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2018.

Books2018About this item

This volume of essays offers direct comparisons of historic Western and Buddhist perspectives on ethics and metaphysics.