Abstract
There are obvious homologies between Hume’s metaphysics and the commitments of Madhyamaka Buddhism, to be found in his treatment of personal identity, the status of the external world and causality. But few have noticed that these homologies extend to ethics. In this essay I argue that Hume’s account of the relation between the metaphysics of the person and ethics, as well as his account of the basis of ethics in natural sympathy (extended through the power of the moral imagination to transform moral perception), also mirror Madhyamaka theory. Comparisons are drawn with the Madhyamaka ethical reflections of Santideva in particular. I do not rest my case on the claim that Hume was indirectly influenced by Buddhist ideas (as has been claimed by others recently, in connection with French intermediaries of the early eighteenth century). In any case, Hume is – in effect – a Mādhyamika through and through.
Thanks to Gordon Davis for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this essay.
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Notes
- 1.
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.
- 2.
See Desideri (2010) for a detailed account of Desideri’s time in Tibet and fascinating observations on Buddhism.
- 3.
See Liu (2002) for more on this affinity.
- 4.
One must be careful not to oversell this disanalogy, however. Śāntideva devotes chapter 8 of Bodhicaryāvatāra (How to Lead an Awakened Life) to meditation precisely because he believes that it is important to repeatedly visualize the consequences of vice and virtue , and the interrelatedness of sentient beings , in order to counteract egoism by cultivating care. So Hume and Śāntideva agree about the need for cultivation, and indeed about the role of the imagination in that cultivation. They disagree about the nature of that cultivation, with Hume taking that process to be social, and Śāntideva taking it to be contemplative .
- 5.
Of course this is not unique to Mahāyāna ethical cultivation . We also see the imagination at work in tantra.
- 6.
- 7.
We might also note that there is a parallel in the Humean and Madhyamaka accounts of the role of reason in action selection itself. In each case, what we desire or reject is determined by the moral passions. Reason ( upāya , or practical wisdom ) enters the picture to determine the means by which we can achieve those ends. This is the point of the “slave of the passions” remark.
- 8.
This, as I argue in 2012a and 2014, is a major difference between a Humean or Buddhist and a Kantian approach to ethics. For Kant , ethics is grounded in a transcendental realm, and in the reality and freedom of a unified self—a transcendental ego and ethical agent . For Hume and his Mādhyamika forebears, ethics is grounded in an understanding of the emptiness of the person, of the absence of such a self, and in the conventional reality of persons and suffering .
- 9.
Translations my own from the sDe dge edition.
- 10.
Translation from Cowherds 2016, pp. 59–60. See pp. 68–74 for the detailed reading of this passage as an argument for the irrationality of egoism .
- 11.
As I argue in 2010/2011, Śāntideva distinguishes in the first chapter of Bodhicaryāvatāra between aspirational and engaged bodhicitta on the basis of whether or not the agent has cultivated a perception of phenomena as empty of intrinsic reality and so a spontaneous attitude of care towards others issuing from a decentering of the self.
- 12.
Though this is not the place to go into this, there is a further nice affinity here: for, just as rGyal tshab claims (190) that the very idea of a self “makes no sense” and that the self “is incoherent, like the horns of a rabbit,” Hume , of course, argues that we have no idea of a self in the first place. So, according to both Hume and rGyal tshab, this is an instance where the intentional content of our passions is not only non-existent, but impossible. And each explain this possibility through a nominalist understanding of conception and intentionality.
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Garfield, J.L. (2018). Hume as a Western Mādhyamika: The Case from Ethics. In: Davis, G. (eds) Ethics without Self, Dharma without Atman. Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures, vol 24. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67407-0_6
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