I‘ve
been working with self development advice for a large percentage of my
life. I’ve come across a lot of concepts and ideas as well as invented
quite a few of my own. But the following is one of the most important
ideas I’ve stumbled across in my life:
Action isn’t just the effect of motivation, but also the cause of it.
Most
people only commit to action if they feel a certain level of
motivation. And they only feel motivation when they feel an emotional
inspiration.
People only become
motivated to study for the exam when they’re afraid of the consequences.
People only pick up and learn that instrument when they feel inspired
by the people they can play for.
And
we’ve all slacked off for lack of motivation before. Especially in times
where we shouldn’t. We feel lethargic and apathetic towards a certain
goal that we’ve set for ourselves because we lack the motivation and we
lack the motivation because we don’t feel any overarching emotional
desire to accomplish something.
But
there’s a problem with operating under this framework: often the
changes and actions we most need in our lives are inspired by negative
emotions which simultaneously hinder us from taking action.
If
someone wants to fix their relationship with their mother, the emotions
of the situation (hurt, resentment, avoidance) completely go against
the necessary action to fix it (confrontation, honesty, communication).
If someone wants to lose weight, but experiences massive amounts of
shame about their body, then the act of going to the gym is apt to
inspire in them the exact emotions that kept them at home on the couch
in the first place. Past traumas, negative expectations, and feelings of
guilt, shame and fear often motivate us away from the actions necessary
to overcome those very traumas, negative expectations, and negative
emotions.
It’s a Catch-22 of sorts. But
the thing about the motivation chain is that it’s not only a three-part
chain, but an endless loop:
Your
actions create further emotional reactions and inspirations and move on
to motivate your future actions. Taking advantage of this knowledge, we
can actually re-orient our mindset in the following way:
Action → Inspiration → Motivation
The conclusion is that if you lack the motivation to make an important change in your life, then do something, anything really, and then harness the reaction to that action as a way to begin motivating yourself.
I call this The “Do Something” Principle.
And I developed it on accident back in my years as a consultant,
helping people who were otherwise immobilized by fears,
rationalizations, and apathy to take action.
It began out of simple pragmatism: you paid me to be here so you might as well do something. I don’t care, do anything!
What
I found is that often once they did something, even the smallest of
actions, it would soon give them the inspiration and motivation to do
something else. They had sent a signal to themselves, “OK, I did that, I
guess I can do more.” And slowly we could take it from there.
Over the years, I’ve applied the “Do Something” Principle in my own life as well.
The
most obvious example is running this website and my business ventures
online. I work for myself. I don’t have a boss telling me what to do and
not to do. I also often have to take major calculated risks in which
I’m personally invested, both financially and emotionally (spending
months writing a book, re-branding my entire website, ceasing promotions
of my past products, etc.). It’s been nerve-wracking at times, and
major feelings of doubt and uncertainty arise. And when no one is around
to push you, sitting around and watching TV reruns all day can quickly
become a more appealing option.
The
first couple years I worked for myself, entire weeks would go by without
accomplishing much for no other reason than I was anxious and stressed
about what I had to do, and it was too easy to put it off. I quickly
learned that forcing myself to do something, even the most menial of
tasks, quickly made the larger tasks seem much easier. If I had to
redesign an entire website, then I’d force myself to sit down and would
say, “OK, I’ll just design the header right now.” But after the header
was done, I’d find myself moving on to other parts of it. And before I
knew it, I’d be energized and engaged in the project.
I
also use this regularly in my own life. If I’m about to tackle a large
project that I’m anxious about, or if I’m in a new country and I need to
give myself a little push to get out and meet people, I apply the Do
Something Principle. Instead of expecting the moon, I just decide, “OK,
I’ll start on the outline,” or “OK, I’ll just go out and have a beer and
see what’s going on.” The mere action of doing this almost always spurs
me on.
Inevitably, the appropriate
action occurs at some point or another. The motivation is natural. The
inspiration is genuine. It’s an overall far more pleasant way of
accomplishing my goals.
My math teacher
used to tell us in high school, “If you don’t know how to do a problem,
start writing something down, your brain will begin to figure it out as
you go.” And sure enough, to this day, this seems to be true. The mere
action itself inspires new thoughts and ideas which lead us to solving
the problems in our lives. But that new insight never comes if we simply
sit around contemplating it.
I
recently heard a story about a novelist who had written over 70 novels.
Someone asked him how he was able to write so consistently and remain
inspired and motivated every day, as writers are notorious for
procrastination and for fighting through bouts of “writer’s block”. The
novelist said, “200 crappy words per day, that’s it.” The idea is that
if he forced himself to write 200 crappy words, more often than not, the
act of writing would inspire him and before he knew it he’d have
thousands down on the page.
You may
recognize this concept among other writings in different guises. I’ve
seen it mentioned in terms such as “failing forward” or “ready, fire,
aim.” But no matter how you frame it to yourself, it’s an extremely
useful mindset and habit to adopt. The more time goes on, the more I
realize that success in anything is tied less to knowledge or talent,
and tied more to action supplemented by knowledge and talent. You can
become successful at something without knowing what you’re doing. You
can become successful at something without having much particular talent
at it. But you can never become successful at anything without taking
action. Ever.
Until
then, I had always known exactly who I was: an exceptionally fortunate
and happy woman, full of irrational exuberance and everyday joy.
I
knew who I was professionally. When I was 16, I’d discovered cognitive
science and analytic philosophy, and knew at once that I wanted the
tough-minded, rigorous, intellectual life they could offer me. I’d
gotten my doctorate at 25 and had gone on to become a professor of
psychology and philosophy at UC Berkeley.
I knew who I was
personally, too. For one thing, I liked men. I was never pretty, but the
heterosexual dance of attraction and flirtation had always been an
important part of my life, a background thrum that brightened and
sharpened all the rest. My closest friends and colleagues had all been
men.
More than anything, though, I was a mother. I’d had a son at
23, and then two more in the years that followed. For me, raising
children had been the most intellectually interesting and morally
profound of experiences, and the happiest. I’d had a long marriage, with
a good man who was as involved with our children as I was. Our youngest
son was on his way to college.I’d
been able to combine these different roles, another piece of good
fortune. My life’s work had been to demonstrate the scientific and
philosophical importance of children, and I kept a playpen in my office
long after my children had outgrown it. Children had been the center of
my life and my work—the foundation of my identity.
And then, suddenly, I had no idea who I was at all.
My
children had grown up, my marriage had unraveled, and I decided to
leave. I moved out of the big, professorial home where I had raised my
children, and rented a room in a crumbling old house. I was living alone
for the first time, full of guilt and anxiety, hope and excitement.
I fell in love—with a woman, much to my surprise—and we talked about starting a new life together. And then my lover ended it.
Joy
vanished. Grief took its place. I’d chosen my new room for its faded
grandeur: black-oak beams and paneling, a sooty brick fireplace in lieu
of central heating. But I hadn’t realized just how dark and cold the
room would be during the rainy Northern California winter. I forced
myself to eat the way I had once coaxed my children (“just three more
bites”), but I still lost 20 pounds in two months. I measured each day
by how many hours had gone by since the last crying jag (“There now, no
meltdowns since 11 this morning”).
I couldn’t work. The
dissolution of my own family made the very thought of children
unbearable. I had won a multimillion-dollar grant to investigate
computational models of children’s learning and had signed a contract to
write a book on the philosophy of childhood, but I couldn’t pass a
playground without tears, let alone design an experiment for 3-year-olds
or write about the moral significance of parental love.Everything that had defined me was gone. I was no longer a scientist or a philosopher or a wife or a mother or a lover.
My
doctors prescribed Prozac, yoga, and meditation. I hated Prozac. I was
terrible at yoga. But meditation seemed to help, and it was interesting,
at least. In fact, researching meditation seemed to help as much as
actually doing it. Where did it come from? Why did it work?
I had
always been curious about Buddhism, although, as a committed atheist, I
was suspicious of anything religious. 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. But still, I began to read
Buddhist philosophy.
In 1734, in scotland, a 23-year-old was falling apart.
As
a teenager, he’d thought he had glimpsed a new way of thinking and
living, and ever since, he’d been trying to work it out and convey it to
others in a great book. The effort was literally driving him mad. His
heart raced and his stomach churned. He couldn’t concentrate. Most of
all, he just couldn’t get himself to write his book. His doctors
diagnosed vapors, weak spirits, and “the Disease of the Learned.” Today,
with different terminology but no more insight, we would say he was
suffering from anxiety and depression. The doctors told him not to read
so much and prescribed antihysteric pills, horseback riding, and
claret—the Prozac, yoga, and meditation of their day.
The
young man’s name was David Hume. Somehow, during the next three years,
he managed not only to recover but also, remarkably, to write his book.
Even more remarkably, it turned out to be one of the greatest books in
the history of philosophy: A Treatise of Human Nature.
In his Treatise,
Hume rejected the traditional religious and philosophical accounts of
human nature. Instead, he took Newton as a model and announced a new
science of the mind, based on observation and experiment. That new
science led him to radical new conclusions. He argued that there was no
soul, no coherent self, no “I.” “When I enter most intimately into what I
call myself,” he wrote in the Treatise, “I always stumble
on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or
shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception.”
Hume
had always been one of my heroes. I had known and loved his work since I
was an undergraduate. In my own scientific papers I’d argued, like
Hume, that the coherent self is an illusion. My research had convinced
me that our selves are something we construct, not something we
discover. I had found that when we are children, we don’t connect the
“I” of the present to the “I” of the past and the future. We learn to be
who we are.Until
Hume, philosophers had searched for metaphysical foundations supporting
our ordinary experience, an omnipotent God or a transcendent reality
outside our minds. But Hume undermined all that. When you really look
hard at everything we think we know, he argued, the foundations crumble.
Descartes at least had said you always know that you yourself exist (“I
think, therefore I am”), but Hume rejected even that premise. Hume articulates a thoroughgoing, vertiginous, existential kind of doubt. In the Treatise,
he reports that when he first confronted those doubts himself he was
terrified—“affrighted and confounded.” They made him feel like “some
strange uncouth monster.” No wonder he turned to the doctors.
But
here’s Hume’s really great idea: Ultimately, the metaphysical
foundations don’t matter. Experience is enough all by itself. What do
you lose when you give up God or “reality” or even “I”? The moon is
still just as bright; you can still predict that a falling glass will
break, and you can still act to catch it; you can still feel compassion
for the suffering of others. Science and work and morality remain
intact. Go back to your backgammon game after your skeptical crisis,
Hume wrote, and it will be exactly the same game.
In fact, if you
let yourself think this way, your life might actually get better. Give
up the prospect of life after death, and you will finally really
appreciate life before it. Give up metaphysics, and you can concentrate
on physics. Give up the idea of your precious, unique, irreplaceable
self, and you might actually be more sympathetic to other people.How
did Hume come up with these ideas, so profoundly at odds with the
Western philosophy and religion of his day? What turned the neurotic
Presbyterian teenager into the great founder of the European
Enlightenment?
In my shabby room, as I read Buddhist philosophy, I
began to notice something that others had noticed before me. Some of
the ideas in Buddhist philosophy sounded a lot like what I had read in
Hume’s Treatise. But this was crazy. Surely in the 1730s, few people in Europe knew about Buddhist philosophy.
Still,
as I read, I kept finding parallels. The Buddha doubted the existence
of an omnipotent, benevolent God. In his doctrine of “emptiness,” he
suggested that we have no real evidence for the existence of the outside
world. He said that our sense of self is an illusion, too. The Buddhist
sage Nagasena elaborated on this idea. The self, he said, is like a
chariot. A chariot has no transcendent essence; it’s just a collection
of wheels and frame and handle. Similarly, the self has no transcendent
essence; it’s just a collection of perceptions and emotions.
“I never can catch myself at any time without a perception.”
That
sure sounded like Buddhist philosophy to me—except, of course, that
Hume couldn’t have known anything about Buddhist philosophy.
Or could he have?
I settled into a new routine.
Instead of going to therapy, I haunted the theology sections of
used-book stores and spent the solitary evenings reading. I would sit in
front of my grand fireplace, where a single sawdust log smoldered,
wrapped in several duvets, and learn more about Buddhism.
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.
I still couldn’t think or write about
children, but maybe I could write an essay about Hume and Buddhism and
include Desideri as a sort of close call—a missed connection.
I consulted Ernest Mossner’s classic biography of Hume. When Hume wrote the Treatise,
he was living in a little French town called La Flèche, 160 miles
southwest of Paris. Mossner said Hume went to La Flèche to “rusticate,”
probably because it was cheap. But he also mentioned that La Flèche was
home to the Jesuit Royal College.
So Hume lived near a French Jesuit college when he wrote the Treatise.
This was an intriguing coincidence for my essay. But it didn’t really
connect him to Desideri, of course, who had lived in Rome and Tibet.
When
I searched the library databases at Berkeley, I found hundreds of books
and thousands of articles I could read about David Hume, but only two
about Ippolito Desideri: one article and a drastically abridged 1932
English translation of his manuscript. The article had appeared in Indica,
an obscure journal published in Bombay, in 1986. I had to get it
shipped down from the regional storage facility, where millions of books
and articles in Berkeley’s collection languish unread. Ever since my
love affair had ended, I had gone to bed each night dreading the next
day. But now I found myself actually looking forward to tomorrow, when
the article would arrive.It
mostly recapitulated what I had read before. But the author, an Italian
named Luciano Petech, mentioned that he had edited a 1952 collection of
missionary documents, I Missionari Italiani nel Tibet e nel Nepal,
and that it included some Desideri manuscripts. And, in passing, he
provided me with an interesting new detail. “In January 1727,” Petech
wrote, “he left India, once more on a French ship, and arrived in
Paris.”
Desideri had come back to Rome through France—one more intriguing coincidence.
The
abridged Desideri translation could be read only in the Rare Book Room,
so I headed there the next day. It was a beautiful book with red
capital letters and romantic tipped-in photographs of majestic Buddhas
and tranquil Himalayan valleys. I began to read eagerly.
I had
been obsessively, ruminatively, fruitlessly trying to figure out who I
was and what I would do without work or love or children to care for. It
was like formulating an argument when the premises refuse to yield the
conclusion, or analyzing a data set that makes no sense. But if I
couldn’t figure myself out, I decided, I could at least try to figure
out Desideri, and so I lost myself in his book, and his life.
It’s a remarkable story.
In his 20s, Desideri conceived his own grand project—to convert the
Indies to Catholicism—and in 1716 he became one of the first Europeans
to go to Lhasa, and the first to stay. He was passionate, emotional, and
easily exasperated. He was also curious, brave, and unbelievably
tenacious. In an early letter written on his way to Tibet, he says he
feels as if he is being torn apart on the rack. “It pleases his divine
majesty to draw my whole heart away with sweet and amorous violence to
where the perdition of souls is great,” he wrote, “and at the same time
with fastest bonds are my feet bound and drawn elsewhere.” He kept up
that intense pitch in everything he did.
Desideri
sailed from Rome to India in 1712. In 1714 he began walking from Delhi
across the Himalayas to Lhasa—a trek that lasted 18 months. He slept on
the ground, in the snow, and struggled with snow blindness and
frostbite. At one point he made his way over a rushing river by clinging
precariously to a bridge made of two vine ropes. To get through the
Ladakh desert, he joined the caravan of a Tartar princess and argued
about theology with her each night in her tent.
When he finally
arrived in Lhasa, the king and the lamas welcomed him enthusiastically,
and their enthusiasm didn’t wane when he announced that he was a lama
himself and intended to convert them all to Catholicism. In that case,
the king suggested, it would be a good idea for him to study Buddhism.
If he really understood Buddhism and he could still convince the
Tibetans that Catholicism was better, then of course they would convert.
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.But
his project was rudely interrupted by war. An army from a nearby
kingdom invaded, laid waste to Lhasa, murdered the king—and then was
itself defeated by a Chinese army. Desideri retreated to an even more
remote monastery. He worked on his Christian tracts and mastered the
basic texts of Buddhism. 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.
It’s
hard to imagine how Desideri kept any sense at all of who he was. He
spent all his time reading, writing, and thinking about another
religion, in another language. (Thupten Jinpa, the current Dalai Lama’s
translator, told me that Desideri’s Tibetan manuscripts are even more
perceptive than the Italian ones, and are written in particularly
beautiful Tibetan, too.) As I read his book, I could feel him fighting
to retain his missionary convictions as he immersed himself in the
practices of “the false and peculiar religion” and became deeply
attached to its practitioners.
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.
Almost at the end
of Desideri’s book, I came across a sentence that brought me up short.
“I passed through La Flèche,” he wrote, “and on September the fourth
arrived in the city of Le Mans.”
La Flèche? Where Hume had
lived? I let out an astonished cry. The librarians, accustomed to Rare
Book Room epiphanies, smiled instead of shushing me.
I headed to a
café, wolfed down a sandwich (I was suddenly hungry again), and took
stock of this new discovery. Could there be a connection after all?
The
English Desideri was abridged. Could I find out more in the Italian
book of missionary documents that Petech had described in his article?
The seven volumes of the 1952 I Missionari Italiani nel Tibet e nel Nepal, never translated or reprinted, arrived from the storage facility the next day.
I
called my brother Blake, an art historian who knows Italian (and
French, German, Latin, and Anglo-Saxon), and got him to translate for
me. Blake had been my mainstay through my darkest days, and I think he
was immeasurably relieved that this time my late-night emergency phone
call was about an obscure manuscript instead of a broken heart.
With
Blake’s help, I made out a longer version of the passage about France.
“On the 31st (August) around noon,” Desideri wrote, “I arrived at our
Royal College at La Flèche. There I received the particular attention of
the rector, the procurator, Père Tolu and several other of the reverend
fathers. On the 4th I left La Flèche.”So
Desideri not only had been to La Flèche but had also talked with the
Jesuits at the Royal College at some length. Reading Petech with Blake, I
realized that the Jesuits at La Flèche might even have had a copy of
Desideri’s manuscript. Petech described the history of Desideri’s
manuscript in detail. He explained that Desideri had actually written
multiple manuscripts about his travels. He wrote the first while he was
sailing from India to France, and evidence suggests that he had this
manuscript with him as he made his way from France to Rome in 1727. When
he got back to Rome, he revised his text considerably, and six months
later he produced a new manuscript. In this version, Desideri writes,
“When I returned through France and Italy to Tuscany and Rome, I was
strongly urged by many men of letters, by gentlemen and by important
personages, to write down in proper order all I had told them at
different times.” The reason? The religion of Tibet was “so entirely
different from any other,” he wrote, that it “deserves to be known in
order to be contested.”
So it was possible that Desideri had sent
the Royal College at La Flèche a copy of this revised manuscript; the
Jesuits regularly circulated such unpublished reports among themselves.
But
Desideri visited in 1727. David Hume arrived at La Flèche eight years
later, in 1735. Could anyone there have told Hume about Desideri? I
couldn’t find any trace of Père Tolu, the Jesuit who had been especially
interested in Desideri.Maybe
Hume’s letters contained a clue? I sat on my narrow sofa bed, listening
to the rain fall, and made my way through his voluminous
correspondence. To be immersed in Desideri’s world was fascinating but
exhausting. To be immersed in Hume’s world was sheer pleasure. Hume
writes better than any other great philosopher and, unlike many great
philosophers, he is funny, humane, fair, and wise. He charmed the
sophisticated Parisian ladies of the grand salons, though he was stout,
awkward, and absentminded and spoke French with an execrable Scots
accent. They called him “le bon David”—the good David.
Hume always
described his time at La Flèche with great fondness. In the one letter
of his that survives from his time there, he says he is engaged in
constant study. La Flèche’s library was exceptional—reading books was a
far better way to learn, he notes, than listening to professors. As for
reaping all the advantages of both travel and study, he writes, “there
is no place more proper than La Flèche … The People are extremely civil
and sociable and besides the good company in the Town, there is a
college of a hundred Jesuits.”
A later letter shows that Hume
talked with at least one of those Jesuits at some length. He recalls
walking in the cloister of the Royal College, his head “full of the
topics of my Treatise,” with a Jesuit “of some parts and
learning.” The Jesuit was describing a miracle, and this inspired Hume
to come up with one of his cleverest skeptical arguments. A real
miracle, he said, is by definition highly improbable, which means that
deception or delusion is always a more likely—and therefore
better—explanation. The Jesuit understood this reasoning (he was “very
much gravelled,” Hume wrote) but said that it simply couldn’t be right,
because if it were, you would have to reject not just the miracle in
question but all the Gospels. “Which observation,” Hume the skeptic
noted drily, “I thought it proper to treat as a sufficient answer.”Who
was this Jesuit “of some parts and learning?” Could he have been one of
the fathers who had met Desideri eight years earlier? And whoever he
was, what else did he and Hume talk about?
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.
I had thought
I would spend that future alone; I was realistic about the prospects of
a 50-year-old female professor. But then I had a romantic adventure or
two.
They were adventures with both women and men. In my period of
crisis I had discovered that I could have deep, sustaining friendships
with women, as well as romance. I had been wrong about that part of my
identity, too.
I was still fragile. A one-line e-mail from my
ex-lover enveloped me in black depression once more. But the adventures
were invigorating.
One of them happened in Montreal. I had grown
up there, and went back to give a lecture at my old university. One
evening I walked up St. Lawrence Boulevard in a swirling snowstorm
toward a rendezvous. Suddenly, my 16-year-old self appeared, in a memory
as vivid as a hallucination, striding through the snow in her hippie
vintage fur coat, saying eagerly, as she often did, “I wonder what will
happen next?”Something was going to happen next, even if it wasn’t the new life I had longed for.
I
got back to work. In 2007, I began the Moore Distinguished Visiting
Fellowship at the California Institute of Technology, in Pasadena, glad
to get away from my dark, cold room and melancholy memories. The school
gave me a big sunny apartment looking out at the San Gabriel Mountains. I
found myself able to write about children again, and I started my next
book, The Philosophical Baby. But I kept working on the Hume project, too.
My
philosophical detective story had driven me to find out more about the
Royal College at La Flèche. If my atheism made me suspicious of the
Buddhists, I was even more suspicious of the Jesuits. After all, at
least in the traditional telling, the whole point of the Enlightenment
had been to dispel the malign influence of the Catholic Church.
The Berkeley library had only one book about the college at La Flèche: Un Collège de Jésuites aux XVIIe et XVIIIe Siècles,
1,200 pages in four fat volumes with marbled covers, printed in 1889. I
had waded through them before I left for Caltech, and had started to
get a picture of the place. And then, fortuitously, my neighbor down the
hall at Caltech turned out to be the historian of science Mordechai
Feingold, one of the world’s leading experts on the 17th- and
18th-century Jesuits and their contributions to science.
For a
long time, the conventional wisdom was that the Jesuits were retrograde
enforcers of orthodoxy. But Feingold taught me that in the 17th century,
the Jesuits were actually on the cutting edge of intellectual and
scientific life. They were devoted to Catholic theology, of course, and
the Catholic authorities strictly controlled which ideas were permitted
and which were forbidden. But the Jesuit fathers at the Royal College
knew a great deal about mathematics and science and contemporary
philosophy—even heretical philosophy.Hume had said that Descartes, Nicolas Malebranche, and Pierre Bayle inspired the Treatise.
Descartes, I learned, graduated from the Royal College, and
Malebranche’s most dedicated students had taught there, although the
most-fervent Malebranchistes were eventually dismissed. Books by
Descartes, Malebranche, and Bayle were in the college library—although
they were on the Index, the Vatican’s list of forbidden books. (Hume’s Treatise would join them later.)
La
Flèche was also startlingly global. In the 1700s, alumni and teachers
from the Royal College could be found in Paraguay, Martinique, the
Dominican Republic, and Canada, and they were ubiquitous in India and
China. In fact, the sleepy little town in France was one of the very few
places in Europe where there were scholars who knew about both
contemporary philosophy and Asian religion.
The Jesuits documented
everything, Feingold told me. If I wanted to know who had talked with
Hume at La Flèche, I could go to Rome to find out.
Toward the end of my Caltech stay, I gave a talk at one of those TED-like
conferences where successful people from different fields gather to
inspire the young and impress one another. A large, striking,
white-haired man in the audience nodded and laughed in an especially
enthusiastic way during my talk. He turned out to be Alvy Ray Smith, a
co-founder of Pixar.
Unlike me, Alvy had leapt into new lives many
times. He had started out as a Southern Baptist boy in small-town New
Mexico, and then had plunged into the wildest reaches of San Francisco’s
counterculture. Later, he impulsively abandoned his job as a
computer-science professor at NYU and took off again for California,
because he felt “something good would happen.” Something did: Xerox PARC,
where he helped invent the first color computer graphics, and then
Lucasfilm, where he helped invent the first computer-generated movies.
He leapt into entrepreneurship and created Pixar—and then left Pixar, to
found a new company, which he sold to Microsoft. He retired on the
proceeds. Now he lived in Seattle, where he collected art, proved
mathematical theorems, and did historical research for fun.His
favorite motto came from Alan Kay, another computer pioneer: “The best
way to predict the future is to invent it.” The conference went on for
two days, and by the end of it, after a few long conversations but
without so much as a kiss, he took another leap and decided that his
next life would be with me. If I was a bit slow to realize it, that was
okay. He was used to the fact that it took other people a while to catch
up to his visions of the future, especially poky academics.
When
my time at Caltech was up, I returned to my old beloved Berkeley house;
my ex-husband had moved to Boston, and I had bought out his half. Alvy
came to visit one weekend, and we began talking on the phone every
night. I had decided to follow Feingold’s advice and go to the Jesuit
archives in Rome, and I asked Alvy, rather tentatively, whether he would
like to come along. It was an unusual venue for a date, but he found
the prospect far more romantic than sitting in the sun by the Trevi
Fountain. It seemed a good omen.
The archives are not easy to
find—they are, appropriately, tucked away behind a corner of St. Peter’s
Basilica. Finding the actual records was not so easy either. But on our
very last day there, 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?
When
I got back to California, I found nothing at all about Dolu in the
Berkeley library catalogs. But Google Books had just been born, so I
searched for Dolu Jesuit in all the world’s libraries. Alvy kept track of what we found, in an impressively thorough and complex spreadsheet.
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.
One
of the other ambassadors was another extraordinary 17th-century figure:
the abbé de Choisy. The abbé was an open and famous transvestite who
gave the ladies of the French court fashion tips. He wrote a very
popular and entertaining account of his trip to Siam. Hume had it in his
library, along with de Choisy’s scandalous autobiography, The Memoirs of the Abbé de Choisy Who Dressed as a Woman.
The abbé’s sexual fluidity was a good example of the adventurous,
boundary-crossing spirit of the 17th century, which often leaves the
21st looking staid by comparison.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.
I had to piece together a picture of
Dolu from contradictory fragments, mostly from his time in India. To
Protestant English writers, he was a typical Catholic zealot. On the
other hand, Catholic Capuchin writers, Desideri’s adversaries, attacked
Dolu and his fellow Jesuits for their sympathy toward Hinduism. Dolu
joined two other priests to break down the doors of a Hindu temple and
destroy lamps and torches. But with Jean-Venance Bouchet, the head of
the Indian mission, he also designed Catholic ceremonies that integrated
Hindu traditions, and the Vatican disapproved. In fact, Bouchet became a
noted scholar of Hinduism and adopted Hindu dress, ascetic practices,
and even vegetarianism.I
also caught glimpses of Dolu the scientist. “There was never a more
polite and generous man, nor one more learned about the natural world,”
reported a periodical of the time. The Jesuits brought state-of-the-art
12-foot-long telescopes to Siam and then to Pondicherry, and they made
important astronomical discoveries. I saw an engraving of King Narai of
Siam gazing through one of the telescopes at a lunar eclipse.
Dolu
had a sense of humor, too, and wrote satirical squibs and plays. An
aristocratic intellectual named Saint-Fonds wrote to a friend that as an
amusement, back in France, he had invited Dolu to lunch with Robert
Challes, an intensely anti-Jesuit writer—indeed, an atheist—who had also
traveled in Siam and India. Saint-Fonds hoped, he said, to enjoy the
furious storm of controversy that would surely result. But instead, “I
found myself in the midst of the gentlest breezes,” he wrote. “P. Dolu,
the name of the missionary, under a wild beard, is a Jesuit per omnes casus, that is to say, polite and politic, and he understands witty repartee better than a man of the world.”
Dolu
was an evangelical Catholic, and Hume was a skeptical Protestant, but
they had a lot in common—endless curiosity, a love of science and
conversation, and, most of all, a sense of humor. Dolu was intelligent,
knowledgeable, gregarious, and witty, and certainly “of some parts and
learning.” He was just the sort of man Hume would have liked.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.
What had I learned?
I’d learned that Hume could indeed have known about Buddhist philosophy. In fact, he had written the Treatise
in one of the few places in Europe where that knowledge was available.
Dolu himself had had firsthand experience of Siamese Buddhism, and had
talked at some length with Desideri, who knew about Tibetan Buddhism.
It’s even possible that the Jesuits at the Royal College had a copy of
Desideri’s manuscript.
Of course, it’s impossible to know for sure what Hume learned at the Royal College, or whether any of it influenced the Treatise.
Philosophers like Descartes, Malebranche, and Bayle had already put
Hume on the skeptical path. But simply hearing about the Buddhist
argument against the self could have nudged him further in that
direction. Buddhist ideas might have percolated in his mind and
influenced his thoughts, even if he didn’t track their source. After
all, contemporary philosophers have been known to borrow ideas without
remembering exactly where they came from.
I published an article
about Hume, Buddhism, and the Jesuits, long on footnotes and short on
romance, in an academic journal. As I was doing my research, many
unfailingly helpful historians told me that my quirky personal project
reflected a much broader trend. Historians have begun to think about the
Enlightenment in a newly global way. Those creaky wooden ships carried
ideas across the boundaries of continents, languages, and religions just
as the Internet does now (although they were a lot slower and perhaps
even more perilous). As part of this new global intellectual history,
new bibliographies and biographies and translations of Desideri have
started to appear, and new links between Eastern and Western philosophy
keep emerging.
It’s easy to think of the Enlightenment as the
exclusive invention of a few iconoclastic European philosophers. But in a
broader sense, the spirit of the Enlightenment, the spirit that both
Hume and the Buddha articulated, pervades the story I’ve been telling.
The drive to convert and conquer the “false and peculiar” in the name of
some metaphysical absolute was certainly there, in the West and in the
East. It still is. But the characters in this story were even more
strongly driven by the simple desire to know, and the simple thirst for
experience. They wanted to know what had happened before and what would
happen next, what was on the other shore of the ocean, the other side of
the mountain, the other face of the religious or philosophical—or even
sexual—divide.
This story may help explain Hume’s ideas. It
unquestionably exemplifies them. All of the characters started out with
clear, and clashing, identities—the passionate Italian missionary and
the urbane French priest, the Tibetan king and lamas, the Siamese king
and monks, the skeptical young Scot.
But I learned that they were
all much more complicated, unpredictable, and fluid than they appeared
at first, even to themselves. Both Hume and the Buddha would have nodded
sagely at that thought. Although Dolu and Desideri went to Siam and
Tibet to bring the wisdom of Europe to the Buddhists, they also brought
back the wisdom of the Buddhists to Europe. Siam and Tibet changed them
more than they changed Siam and Tibet. And his two years at La Flèche
undoubtedly changed David Hume.
Hume and the Jesuits and Siam and
Tibet changed me as well. I’d always thought Hume was right about the
self. But now, for the first time, I felt that he was right.
In
2010, Alvy and I got married—the future reinvented. Once again, I was
an exceptionally fortunate and happy woman, full of irrational
exuberance and everyday joy. But that’s not all I was. I’d discovered
that I could love women as well as men, history as well as science, and
that I could make my way through sadness and solitude, not just
happiness. Like Dolu and Desideri, the gender-bending abbé and the
Siamese astronomer-king, and, most of all, like Hume himself, I had
found my salvation in the sheer endless curiosity of the human mind—and
the sheer endless variety of human experience.
