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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
[This post is in honor of a conference on Hume's Science of Human Nature in Prague--ES.]
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.
During the last decade, the anti-Newtonian reading has gained prominence (in the hands of Yoram Hazony, Miren Boehm, and Tamas Demeter). Hume is clearly a critic of Newton in at least three direct ways: he is critical of the application of geometry ( 1.2.4.17-29, 1.3.1.6, and especially 1.4.4.1-6), and his treatments of space & time are clearly undermining Newton's understanding of his own achievement. In addition, Hume insists that his own science is more foundational than Newton's. In many ways, Hume's Treatise reflects the influence of neo-Cartesian views. If people pay attention to this they point to Malebranche (an acknowledged source of Hume's Treatise.)
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.