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His Life, Character, and Philosophy

An attempt on the life of Baruch Spinoza
A religious fanatic slashes Spinoza’s cloak outside Amsterdam’s Portuguese Synagogue. Spinoza kept the torn cloak for the remainder of his life.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Baruch Spinoza transformed Western philosophy with his radical ideas on God, freedom, and the nature of reality, inspiring thinkers from Goethe and Hegel to Einstein. Yet the man who identified God with nature was denounced as a heretic, excommunicated by his own community, and earned his living grinding lenses in rented rooms. Few philosophers have lived so quietly while thinking so dangerously.

Steeped in Descartes

When Descartes died, Baruch Spinoza (also known, after his excommunication, as Benedict, or Benedictus, de Spinoza) was seventeen years old.

Growing up in Amsterdam, he became familiar with the philosophy of Descartes—to the extent that, until 1660, he supported himself by giving private lessons in Cartesianism.

In fact, he became, as far as method is concerned, more thoroughly Cartesian even than Descartes. His Principles of Cartesian Philosophy, published in 1663, is a reconstruction of Descartes’s Principles of Philosophy in the formal deductive format of Euclid’s geometry, complete with definitions, axioms, and theorems. It succeeded not only in recasting Descartes’s system, but also in clarifying, refining, and, finally, undermining it.

Given its merits, Spinoza held on to the geometric method for his magnum opus, the Ethics [Ethica, ordine geometrico demonstrata]. Its geometric method provided Spinozism with added curiosity and credibility, and, to an extent, still does.

Freedom in the Dutch Republic

Like Descartes before him, Spinoza enjoyed relative freedom in what has retrospectively been called the Dutch Republic (formally, the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands; informally, the United Provinces), then in its golden age and the most liberal, and richest, place in Europe.

In the preface to his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (TTP, 1670), Spinoza eulogises his country and its constitution:

Now since we have the rare good fortune to live in a commonwealth where freedom of judgement is fully granted to the individual citizen and he may worship God as he pleases, and where nothing is esteemed dearer and more precious than freedom, I am undertaking no ungrateful or unprofitable task in demonstrating that not only can this freedom be granted without endangering piety and the peace of the commonwealth, but also the peace of the commonwealth and piety depend on this freedom.

In the TTP, Spinoza critically analyses the Bible and argues for the establishment of a secular state founded on toleration. His purpose in critiquing the Bible is to undermine the repressive theological and political order of the era. ‘The purpose of the state’ he concludes, ‘is freedom’—a maxim far ahead of its time, and inscribed on the pedestal of his monument in Amsterdam.

Merchant or Philosopher?

For all its freedoms, life in Amsterdam had not been a bed of tulips. Spinoza’s paternal grandfather Isaac, a Portuguese Jew, had fled the Iberian Inquisition. In the early 1630s, his father Miguel and uncle Abraham moved the family business from Rotterdam to Amsterdam, where Baruch was born. Had the firm not been bankrupted, essentially, by the First Anglo-Dutch War, Spinoza might have continued as an importer of fruits, nuts, and wine.

Attempted Assassination and Excommunication

In April 1655, on the steps of Amsterdam’s Portuguese synagogue, a knife-wielding fanatic attempted to assassinate Baruch, shouting, ‘Heretic!’ Fortunately, the assassin succeeded only in slashing his cloak, which he kept as a memento of the dangers of fanaticism. 

A year later, on 27 July 1656, in his twenty-fourth year, his Jewish community expelled him for his freedom of mind. His excommunication order decried his ‘abominable heresies’ and ‘monstrous deeds’: ‘By the decree of the angels, and by the command of the holy men, we excommunicate, expel, curse and damn Baruch de Espinoza…’

Cursed be he by day and cursed be he by night; cursed be he when he lies down, and cursed be he when he rises up; cursed be he when he goes out, and cursed be he when he comes in. The Lord will not spare him; the anger and wrath of the Lord will rage against this man, and bring upon him all the curses which are written in this book, and the Lord will blot out his name from under heaven, and the Lord will separate him to his injury from all the tribes of Israel with all the curses of the covenant, which are written in the Book of the Law.

The sting, however, came in the tail, banning all members of his community, including close family, from engaging with him: ‘We order that no one should communicate with him orally or in writing, or show him any favour, or stay with him under the same roof, or within four ells [around four metres] of him, or read anything composed or written by him.’

In a tradition going back to Socrates and Plato, he wrote (but did not publish) an ‘apology’, or defence. Although the work has been lost, he incorporated its contents into later works, especially the TTP—which a viral pamphlet described as, ‘forged in Hell by a renegade Jew and the Devil…’ 

Some time after his excommunication, he adopted the motto Caute [Take care] and had it engraved on his signet ring along with a thorny rose (‘Spinoza’ derives from the Latin spinosus, ‘thorny’).

Life as a Castaway

After his excommunication, Spinoza boarded in rented rooms in other people’s houses, in Amsterdam, in Rijnsburg near Leiden, in Voorburg, and finally in The Hague.

Those who knew him were struck by his simplicity, courtesy, and quiet contentment. He lived so frugally that his daily meals often consisted of little more than bread, milk, raisins, and a little butter. In his spare moments, he watched spiders weave their webs and observed flies under his microscope.

In Rijnsburg, under the influence of Descartes, he wrote the unfinished Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, on knowledge and method and the purification (or ‘emendation’) of the intellect.

This work on ‘thinking skills’ opens with a sentence that could have been written by Seneca or some other Stoic:

After experience had taught me the hollowness and futility of everything that is ordinarily encountered in daily life, and I realised that all the things which were the source and object of my anxiety held nothing of good or evil in themselves save insofar as the mind was influenced by them, I resolved at length to enquire whether there existed a true good, one which was capable of communicating itself and could alone affect the mind to the exclusion of all else—whether, in fact, there was something whose discovery and acquisition would afford me a continuous and supreme joy to all eternity.

For fear of compromising his freedom, Spinoza rejected a stipend from a patron and a professorship at Heidelberg, to eke out a living by grinding lenses—including for Huygens, who, in 1667, wrote to his brother, ‘The [lenses] that the Jew of Voorburg has in his microscopes have an admirable polish.’

He should have taken the stipend: the inhalation of glass dust led to his death in 1677, at the age of forty-four, from silicosis.

In the months preceding his death, the thirty-year-old Leibniz, as if acting on a premonition, travelled to The Hague and spent several days in conversation with him—in arguably the greatest meeting of minds since Plato and Aristotle.

The God of the Ethics

Spinoza’s masterpiece, The Ethics, completed in 1675 and published posthumously in 1677, consists of five parts.

The first part, Concerning God, contains an ontological proof, founded on his necessary perfection, for the existence of God, not dissimilar to the one deployed by Descartes. 

Departing from Descartes, Spinoza argues that God is not beyond the world but at one with it. Propositions 14 and 15 state, ‘No substance apart from God can exist or be conceived,’ and, ‘Whatever exists, exists in God, and nothing can exist or be conceived without God.’ This lack of a distinction between the Creator and his creation is encapsulated in the slogan, Deus sive natura, ‘God, or nature.’

Many contemporaries understood Spinoza to be an atheist, although later Romantics interpreted him rather as a pantheist. The Romantic poet Novalis (1772-1801) famously referred to him as ein Gottbetrunkener Mensch, ‘a God-intoxicated man.’

The Mind-Body Problem

Whereas, starting from an ontological argument, Descartes had argued that at least one thing exists, and that that one thing would not deceive us, Spinoza had argued that at most one thing exists, and that that one thing is everything, including us.

For Spinoza, you and I have no independent existence outside of God; we are not substances, but modes of God, who is the one and only substance.

God has infinitely many attributes, but we can only know two of them, namely, thought and extension. Spinoza’s answer to the mind-body problem is thus to deny that there is a problem: thought and extension, that is, mind and body, are two ways of apprehending the same reality.

Mind and body do not interact, or even correlate, but simply correspond, like the two sides of a same coin.

Freedom

God being eternally and necessarily as he is, things could not be otherwise. Everything follows from God’s essence and prior causes. This being so, nothing is intrinsically good or evil; ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are simply subjective judgements as to what may be helpful or harmful to our survival.

Freedom, too, is a construct of the human mind. People think that they have free will because they cannot grasp the complex concatenation of infinite causes that determines their every thought and action. Freedom is not the ability to do otherwise, but the capacity to comprehend reality as if outside of time and subjectivity, sub specie aeternitatis, under the aspect of eternity, in the manner of a geometrical proof.

Freedom, in other words, is knowledge, which leads to tranquillity and virtue, is blessedness, and can only be achieved in the secular state.

Immortality

There is no afterlife or personal immortality, because there is no person. But the human mind is capable of grasping eternal truths and, in so doing, participates in something that transcends the individual. If we can bring ourselves to see the world sub specie aeternitatis and share in the eternal mind of God, we achieve a kind of immortality.

Appraisal

As I said, Spinoza has been read by some as an atheist and by others as a pantheist. I see in his Ethics many parallels with Stoicism, Paganism, and, above all, Hindu Vedanta. As per the Chandogya Upanishad, ‘When a man knows the best and the greatest, he becomes the best and the greatest.’

Both ancient and remarkably modern, Spinoza stood completely outside, or beyond, his time. While we may debate the nature of his God, we cannot doubt what he, or it, is not, namely, the God of the Bible—and wonder whether Spinoza’s metaphysics derives, in fact, from his politics.

When asked whether he believed in God, Einstein replied, ‘I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, but not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings.’

Whereas Descartes, with his vain attempts at resolving the mind-body problem, had struggled to salvage received religion from the trainwreck of the Scientific Revolution, Spinoza did his utmost to overturn it.

The metaphysics of Leibniz, who almost literally picked up the torch from the dying Spinoza, may be read as an attempt to solve the mind-body problem while preserving, rather than overturning, the status quo ante.

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If this essay spoke to you, you might look into The German Greeks.

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His Life, Character, and Philosophy

Hume leading Rousseau to the safety of England
Rebels on the run. Hume leading Rousseau to safety in England.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Rousseau’s ideas on freedom, education, inequality, and the corrupting influence of civilisation transformed politics, philosophy, and literature, inspiring figures from Immanuel Kant to the leaders of the French Revolution. Yet the man who urged humanity to return to nature lived a life marked by poverty, exile, and growing paranoia. Few thinkers have had so great an influence while living such a turbulent—and scandalous—life.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau was born on 28 June 1712 in the Republic of Geneva, more precisely, at 40 Grand-Rue, which still stands on the hill of Geneva’s quaint old town. The French reformer Jean Calvin had arrived in Geneva in 1536, a few months after the city had turned to Protestantism and shaken off the dukes of Savoy. Surrounded by Catholic states, the self-governing city became a haven for Protestant refugees drawn to Calvin’s teachings, and came to be known as the Protestant Rome.

Although he once forfeited his Genevan citizenship (in 1728, at the age of sixteen, for converting to Roman Catholicism) and once renounced it (in 1763, after Geneva condemned the Social Contract and Emile, leading to a warrant for his arrest), Rousseau always pointedly signed his books, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Citoyen de Genève [Citizen of Geneva]. His political thought and religious puritanism are deeply rooted in the Cité de Calvin (or Kalvingrad, as locals still call it, on account of Calvin’s austerity), which he held up as a foil to frivolous Paris and absolutist France.

Rousseau’s father, the watchmaker Isaac Rousseau, also had strong Republican sympathies. His mother Suzanne had been raised by her uncle Samuel Bernard, a Calvinist preacher, and had come with a handsome dowry—hence the house on the Grand-Rue. Only three months after the birth of their first child, Isaac left for Constantinople to serve as watchmaker to the sultan (or so he claimed). He returned after a full six years, shortly after Suzanne’s live-in mother had died and Suzanne had come into 10,000 florins. Soon after his return, Jean-Jacques was born.

Childhood in Geneva

A few days after giving birth to Jean-Jacques, Suzanne died from puerperal fever (a postpartum infection). Isaac’s younger sister moved in to help with the children, and Rousseau grew close to his aunt. From the age of six, he, together with his father, began reading a collection of classics left by Samuel Bernard. Plutarch, who emphasised character over deeds, made the deepest impression on him. Although (or because) he did not receive a formal education, Rousseau rose into a master of French prose.

At the age of ten, Jean-Jacques’s father entered a quarrel and fled to nearby Nyon (then administered by Berne), taking his sister with him. Jean-Jacques and his brother were handed over to the Bernards. The Bernards sent Jean-Jacques and his cousin Abraham Bernard to live with the Calvinist minister Lambercier and his sister Gabrielle in Bossey, a village just outside the city walls, where Jean-Jacques discovered a passion for nature.

At the age of thirteen, Jean-Jacques was sent back to Geneva to work as an apprentice, first to a notary and then to an engraver who frequently beat him. At the age of sixteen, he ran away after returning from a walk and finding that the city gates had been locked.

Madame de Warens

On the run in Savoie, he found shelter with a Catholic priest. The priest put him onto the attractive Françoise-Louise de Warens, who had separated from her husband, converted to Catholicism, and become a proselytiser in the pay of Victor Amadeus II of Savoy (since 1720, Piedmont-Sardinia). Completely smitten, Rousseau completed his conversion to Catholicism in the Piedmont-Sardinia capital of Turin, where he supported himself by working as a footman and secretary to an ailing countess. After the countess died, he pocketed a pink and silver ribbon, which was discovered in his room. He blamed a cook, Marion, who of course denied it. The Count de la Roque dismissed them both with the prophetic words, ‘The conscience of the guilty will avenge the innocent.’

At the age of twenty, Rousseau returned to Madame de Warens in Chambéry, and their relationship turned sexual. Although Warens was also intimate with her household steward, he considered it the greatest love of his life. He began to call her Maman, and she him Mon petit. So far, so French.

In those years, he struggled to establish himself and spent a year travelling. He went mostly on foot, meeting people from all walks of life. When he returned to Warens, he pursued his love of music and read deeply. But Warens could no longer support him, so, at the age of twenty-seven, he took a post as a tutor in Lyon, which gave him the opportunity to reflect on pedagogy.

The Paris Years: The Greatest Scandal of All

With Warens growing cold on him, in 1742, at the age of thirty, Rousseau moved to Paris to present a new system of musical notation to the Académie des Sciences. The Académie praised his mastery of the subject but found his system impractical and rejected it. In 1743, his Enlightenment connections led him to a job as secretary to the French ambassador in Venice. He revelled in the superior Italian music, but did not get on with the ambassador and, the following year, returned to Paris.

He met a laundry girl, Thérèse Levasseur, who would become his life companion and, in time, his wife. In 1746, she bore the first of their five illegitimate children. All five were immediately handed to a foundling hospital, where the chances of surviving into adulthood would have been slim. Later, Voltaire would anonymously publish a pamphlet to expose this secret and discredit Rousseau as a moral and educational authority. Rousseau took in Thérèse and her mother to live with him as servants, and assumed the burden of supporting her large and feckless family.

Rousseau wrote ballets, with little success. He began to spend a lot of time with Diderot, Condillac, and d’Alembert, and became involved with Diderot’s brainchild, the Encyclopédie, to which he contributed almost four hundred articles on politics and music. The Encyclopédie, a pillar of the Enlightenment, was denounced by both the king and the Church.

The Paris Years: The First Discourse and the King’s Pension

In 1749, Diderot was imprisoned in Vincennes for his Letter on the Blind for the Use of Those Who Can See. While walking to Vincennes to visit him, Rousseau read an announcement in the Mercure de France for the Dijon Academy’s essay contest, on the question, ‘Has the restoration of the sciences and arts contributed to the purification of morals?’ This led to the radical and distinctly un-Enlightened idea that the arts and sciences had led to the moral degeneration of man, who began as moral and vigorous—or, at least, uncorrupted by vanity, superficiality, inauthenticity, luxury, and inequality. Whereas the spirited Spartans set all of Asia trembling, the sophisticated and self-indulgent Sybarites let themselves be overrun by a bunch of peasants. In his Confessions, Rousseau wrote, ‘Within an instant of reading this [advertisement], I saw another universe and became another man.’ With his prize-winning essay, Discourse on the Arts and Sciences (the ‘First Discourse’), Rousseau rose into a cause célèbre.

In 1752, Rousseau wrote a simple, Italian-inspired one-act opera, Le Devin du village, which premiered at the royal court at Fontainebleau. The king liked it enough to offer him a pension, which he declined—gaining further notoriety as ‘the man who had refused a king’s pension’.

Return to Geneva and the Second Discourse

In 1754, Rousseau returned to Geneva, converted back to Calvinism, and had his Genevan citizenship restored. He embraced a personal, natural religion, or ‘religion of the heart’, which, together with his belief in the corrupting influence of civilisation, set him apart from the other Encyclopédistes, who championed reason and progress, and atheism.

In 1755, he completed his second major work, the Discourse on Inequality (the ‘Second Discourse’), in which he painted a rosy picture of man in the original ‘state of nature’ and argued that private property is the original source and basis of all inequality and misery. The ‘social contract’ was essentially a conspiracy by the rich to legitimise their ownership and enslave the masses. Though it is impossible to return to the state of nature, it is possible to correct some of the errors of civilisation. When Voltaire received his copy, he wrote back to Rousseau: ‘No one has ever employed so much intellect to persuade men to be beasts. In reading your work one is seized with a desire to walk on all fours.’

Madame d’Epinay, Sophie d’Houdetot, and Julie

The saloniste Madame d’Epinay, having noticed the second discourse, offered Rousseau a pension together with a cottage on her estate in Montmorency. He refused the pension but moved into the cottage with Thérèse and her mother. He resented being in the keep of Madame d’Epinay and soured things by falling head over heels for her cousin and sister-in-law, Sophie d’Houdetot. He came to believe that there was a plot against him and wrote a series of letters to the likes of Diderot and Hume that damaged his reputation. In 1757, he moved with Thérèse into a villa on the nearby estate of the duc de Luxembourg, who became his patron. His bestselling novel, Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse (1761), is inspired by his liaisons with d’Houdetot and Warens.

The Social Contract and Emile

After Julie, Rousseau turned his pen to his two most acclaimed works, the Social Contract and Emile. In the Social Contract, which begins with the famous sentence, ‘Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains,’ Rousseau sets out how to create a just state in which we may recover some of our natural freedom and goodness. Only the general will [volonté générale], which aims at the common good of a people, has the right to legislate. Although Rousseau advocated for direct democracy, the general will need not coincide with the majority vote if citizens are misinformed or motivated by self-interest rather than the common good. The general will, which is the sovereign power, can only legislate laws that apply equally to all, and must be separate from the executive power, which deals with matters of application of the law. Only under the general will can the people be said to be freely obeying themselves.

In Emile, Rousseau, an autodidact with no formal education, set out a system of education which might preserve the individual’s innate vigour and morality. Having encouraged the child to become active, curious, and critical, it remains, in adolescence, to make him into a loving and feeling being, ‘to perfect reason by sentiment’. Emile, however, is aimed exclusively at wealthy orphan boys with a dedicated, live-in tutor (orphan, to remove the corrupting influence of the parents). In the section on Emile’s female counterpart Sophie, Rousseau states that ladies should be ‘passive and weak’ and ‘put up little resistance’. Book IV contains the incendiary ‘Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar’, in which the vicar’s argument leads to natural religion, that is, to an unmediated, self-discovered relationship with a creator God. In a letter, Voltaire deemed Emile ‘a hodgepodge of a silly wet nurse in four volumes, with forty pages against Christianity, among the boldest ever known’ [C’est un fatras d’une sotte nourrice en quatre tomes, avec une quarantaine de pages contre le christianisme, des plus hardies qu’on ait jamais écrites].

On the Run

The Social Contract and Emile were banned from both France and Geneva, with warrants issued for Rousseau’s arrest. Over the next few years, Rousseau moved from place to place until his reputation caught up with him. For a time, he lived on an island on Lake Biel, where no one could throw stones at his windows. Frederick the Great, on principle rather than from shared conviction, offered him protection and assistance. His nemesis Voltaire invited him in vain to Ferney (nowadays, Ferney-Voltaire) on the Geneva border, where renegade writers could border hop to escape the authorities.

In 1766, Rousseau travelled to England with Hume. Tasked with escorting Thérèse to England, Boswell seduced her en route, with Thérèse telling him, ‘Don’t imagine you’re a better lover than Rousseau.’ Perhaps understandably, Rousseau’s paranoia intensified, and he began to suspect Hume of being at the centre of a plot to ridicule him. The two men fell out when Hume, seeking to protect his reputation, published an account of the whole affair.

Final Years

Rousseau returned to France in 1767 under an assumed name, and spent the next three years in paranoid retreat. He married Thérèse, practised botany, and wrote his disarmingly candid Confessions, published posthumously in 1782.

He died in 1778, at the age of sixty-six, from what was recorded as apoplexy (some said suicide). He was buried at midnight by torchlight on the île des Peupliers on the estate of the marquis de Girardin in Ermenonville. In 1794, his remains were moved to the Panthéon and placed next to those of… Voltaire.

Despite his love of hosting, conversation, and fine dining, Kant’s house was unadorned and austere. He had only one picture, which hung above his bureau. This picture was of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who was only twelve years older than him.

In his Remarks on the Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime (1764), Kant acknowledges his debt to Rousseau, who, he says, ‘set him right’:

I feel a consuming thirst for knowledge, and a restless passion to advance in it… There was a time when I thought this alone could constitute the honour of mankind, and I despised the common man who knows nothing. Rousseau set me right. This blind prejudice vanishes; I learn to respect human beings, and I should consider myself far more useless than the common labourer if I did not believe that this consideration could impart a value to all others in order to establish the rights of humanity.

Rousseau had taught Kant to judge people by their moral worth, rather than their education and standing—a lesson that would have resonated with Kant’s memory of his mother.

Rousseau’s influence also extended to Kant’s moral philosophy. If for Rousseau, it is by following the general will that we can be said to be free, for Kant, it is by obeying those moral laws that we would will as universal laws. Moral laws that we would will as universal laws are given not by our individual will but by our rational will, which we have in common with all other rational beings. We often experience this dichotomy in our minds: this is what I selfishly or frivolously want to do, and this is what I truly ought to do—because I want to live in the kind of society that abides by this principle, and would resent it if other people behaved in such a selfish, thoughtless way. To conform to the universal law is not to be a slave; on the contrary, it is to follow reason and free ourselves from our irrational and disordered appetites. For Kant, this capacity to overrule our individual will lies at the heart of our special dignity.

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If you want to know what happened next, read The German Greeks, which tells the story of how Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and others responded to the philosophical revolution that Rousseau helped to create.

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His Life, Character, and Philosophy

Hume leading Rousseau to the safety of England
Hume leading Rousseau to safety in England

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

David Hume was one of the greatest philosophers of the Enlightenment—and one of its most controversial. At a time when philosophers placed their faith in reason, he questioned everything from causation and the self to religion and morality. His radical scepticism led many to regard him as an atheist and cost him several university appointments. Yet the man whom many feared for his ideas was, by all accounts, open, sociable, and cheerful. Today, he is recognised as one of the most influential thinkers in the history of philosophy.

David Hume was born in 1711 in Edinburgh. His father Joseph was the laird of Ninewells, his mother Katherine the daughter of the Lord President of the Court of Session (Scotland’s supreme civil court). His father’s family was a cadet branch of the Earls of Home (pronounced ‘Hume’). In 1713, Joseph died at the age of thirty-three, leaving Katherine in sole care of three tots.

Hume went up to the University of Edinburgh at the age of ten or twelve, young even for the time, but found little of value in formal lectures. Later, he told a friend that ‘there is nothing to be learnt from a professor, which is not to be met in books.’ He shunned the legal studies that his family intended for him, preferring instead to devour classical and philosophical texts. ‘While [my family] fancied I was poring upon Voet and Vinnius, Cicero and Virgil were the authors which I was secretly devouring.’

This inner conflict drove him, at the age of eighteen, to a nervous breakdown. A local physician diagnosed ‘a disease of the learned’ and had the good sense to prescribe horse riding for outdoors and, for indoors, wine drinking, which worked a charm. Once Hume had found and embraced who he was, his malady never returned. In later life, he became an advocate of ‘ordinary life’ as a cure for ‘philosophical melancholy’.

I dine, I play backgammon, I converse … and whenafter three or four hours’ amusement, I would return to speculations, they appear so cold, and strain’d, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any further.

A Treatise of Human Nature

In 1734, at twenty-three, Hume moved to Bristol to work as a clerk for a sugar importer. Ill-suited to the job, he soon left for Paris, then Rheims, then the small town of La Flèche, with its Jesuit college made famous for having schooled Descartes. Hume had been attracted to La Flèche by the college’s library of some 40,000 books, as well as the lower cost of living compared to Paris or Rheims. He remained in La Flèche for three years (1734-1737), during which he wrote A Treatise of Human Nature.

When it was published in 1739, the reception was not as Hume had hoped. In the short autobiography written near (almost at) the end of his life, he tells us that the Treatise ‘fell dead-born from the press, without reaching such distinction, as even to excite a murmur among the zealots.’ He disavowed the Treatise and asked that his more polished Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748) be regarded as his final word—a request that posterity has ignored.

Essays Moral and Political

After his disappointment with the Treatise, Hume turned to essay writing, which was then in vogue. In 1742, he published the first volume of his Essays Moral and Political, which were favourably received and ‘soon made me entirely forget my former disappointment’.

Hume developed a talent for prose and a reputation as a skeptic and all-round heretic. In 1745, he applied for the vacant chair of moral philosophy at Edinburgh, but was rejected on the strength of his reputation. He took up the post of tutor and companion to the troubled and impossible Marquess of Annandale, but resigned after a year.

He then joined a planned expedition to Quebec, serving as secretary to Lieutenant-General James St Clair. However, the expedition was cancelled and the forces diverted to a raid on Lorient in Brittany. The failure of this operation did not prevent Hume from sporting the uniform of an officer on subsequent diplomatic missions with St Clair to the courts of Vienna and Turin (then the capital of Savoy).

History of Great Britain

In 1748, Hume’s re-write of the first volume of the Treatise of Human Nature was published as Philosophical Essays Concerning Human Understanding (retitled in 1758 to An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding). After being turned down as an improper person for the Chair of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow, he became, in 1752, the Keeper of the Advocates’ Library in Edinburgh—affording him the time and resources to write his monumental, and monumentally successful, History of Great Britain, published in six volumes over eight years (1754-62). Hume became, in his own words, ‘not only independent, but opulent.’ Such was the success of the History that, in his lifetime and for a long time after, he was better known as a historian than a philosopher.

Rescuing Rousseau

In 1763, Hume became Secretary to the British Embassy in Paris. He basked in the adulation that le tout Paris afforded to a successful writer. He acquired the nickname le bon David and, according to Horace Walpole, became ‘fashion itself’. Though the relationship was never consummated, he became intimate with the countess and grande dame Madame de Boufflers.

At that time, Jean-Jacques Rousseau was in big trouble following the publication of The Social Contract and Emile. Boufflers put Hume to rescuing Rousseau by sending him to the safety of England. In January 1766, at the end of his tenure at the embassy, Hume left for London with Rousseau. The two men had much in common, not least their infamy, and held each other in the highest regard. But Rousseau was prone to paranoia and began to suspect Hume of being at the centre of a plot to ridicule him. To protect his good reputation against Rousseau’s mighty pen, Hume reluctantly pre-empted Rousseau by publishing an account of the whole affair.

Final Years

In 1767, Hume took up his last appointment as Under-Secretary of State for the Northern Department (the predecessor of the Foreign Office). The following year, he retired to Edinburgh and built himself a house in St Andrew’s Square, where he lived with his sister Katherine.

Within ten years, shortly after the American Declaration of Independence (July 1776), Hume died from a ‘disorder of the bowels’. He wrote a concise autobiography, My Own Life, so near to his death that at the end he switches to the past tense:

I am, or rather was (for that is the style I must now use in speaking of myself, which emboldens me the more to speak my sentiments); I was, I say, a man of mild disposition, of command of temper, of an open, social, and cheerful humour, capable of attachment, but little susceptible of enmity, and of great moderation in all my passions. Even my love of literary fame, my ruling passion, never soured my temper, notwithstanding my frequent disappointments … I cannot say there is no vanity in making this funeral oration of myself, but I hope it is not a misplaced one; and this is a matter of fact which is easily cleared and ascertained.

In his eulogy, Adam Smith, who had recently published The Wealth of Nations (1776), wrote that his friend Hume approached ‘as nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man as perhaps the nature of human frailty will permit’.

The Newton of Human Affairs

Already at the age of eighteen, Hume complained about philosophy being engaged in ‘endless disputes’ of an entirely hypothetical nature. He disparagingly referred to rationalist systems such as those of Leibniz, Spinoza, and Descartes as ‘speculative metaphysics’. 

Newton, in contrast, set out only to describe and predict events, without seeking to explain them. One of his most famous phrases is, Hypotheses non fingo [I do not feign hypotheses].

I have not as yet been able to discover the reason for these properties of gravity from phenomena, and I do not feign hypotheses. For whatever is not deduced from the phenomena must be called a hypothesis; and mere hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, or based on occult qualities, or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy. In this philosophy particular propositions are inferred from the phenomena, and afterwards rendered general by induction.

Hume saw himself as extending Newton’s experimental method to the study of human nature and the ‘moral sciences’—whence the subtitle of A Treatise of Human Nature: Being an Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects.

Empiricism and Skepticism

At the core of Hume’s radical empiricism are two tenets. First, there are no innate ideas: all knowledge and concepts must arise or else derive from sensory impressions. Without prior observation, Adam (from Adam and Eve) could not have inferred that fire would burn him, or water drown him. All that is not founded in sense experience is essentially meaningless. 

Second, all we can directly perceive are our internal mental states. The self is no more than a bundle or collection of various perceptions and sensations, ‘which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity’. Taken together, these two tenets have dramatically skeptical implications, undermining traditional concepts such as God, the soul, a persistent self, external objects, and causation.

The Problem of Causation

When it comes to causation, we never perceive a ‘necessary connection’ between events, only ever a ‘constant conjunction’ of one event following another, over and over again. The supposed causal link is missing from sense experience. Cause and effect are merely a habit of mind. But that the sun keeps on rising every morning need not mean that it will always rise every morning. Cause and effect, which underpins all science, is justified not by reason and deduction but only by induction (habit), which is unsafe.

Reason the Slave of the Passions

At the height of the Age of Reason, Hume was the great debaser of reason. ‘Reason’ he said, ‘is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions…’ 

Still today, most people think of choice and action as a battleground between reason and the ‘passions’ (desires, emotions, and sensations). Hume argued that it is in fact a battleground between the passions and the passions. For example, if I pass over dessert, this is because my desire to feel and look good is stronger than my desire to eat something heavenly. It can sometimes feel as if the passions are fighting with reason, when, really, it is an urgent passion, such as my desire for dessert, fighting with a calmer, longer term one, such as my desire for moderation which masquerades as reason.

Reason on its own cannot impel action. Its role is simply to supply us with true beliefs about the best means of achieving the ends that our passions have already determined. The aim of a monarch or general in delivering a battle exhortation is not to be right or logically sound, but to fire up the passions and try to make it so that the resolve of his men is greater than their fear.

A passion may be justified or unjustified, but cannot be true or false like a belief. When a passion is founded on a false belief, the problem is with the false belief rather than the passion. Once we have ascertained that there are no gremlins under the bed, or persuaded ourselves that there are no such things as ghosts, our fear of these things simply evaporates.

Morality and the ‘Is-Ought’ Problem

Because morality is about choices and actions, it cannot arise from reason. Or in Hume’s famous turn of phrase, ‘You cannot derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’.’ Prescriptive statements (‘oughts’) arise not from facts and reason but from values and feelings, especially the capacity for sympathy, which leads to pleasure in response to prosocial actions and aversion in response to antisocial ones. Whenever a prescriptive statement appears to derive from a descriptive one, this is only because there is a prescriptive premise that is missing but presumed. For example: ‘Stealing harms other people. Therefore, we ought not steal.’ The presumed prescriptive premise here is, ‘We ought not harm other people’—which is not a fact but a value judgement.

You can see why Immanuel Kant was disturbed by all of this. If Hume was right, science rested on habit rather than certainty, and morality on feeling rather than reason. His response, the 856-page Critique of Pure Reason (1781), emerged after a ‘silent decade’ during which he retreated into himself and published a total of just 23 pages. He later wrote that it was Hume who had awakened him from his ‘dogmatic slumber’.

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If you want to know what happened next, read The German Greeks, which tells the story of how Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and others responded to the philosophical revolution that Hume helped to create.

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Getting to the Real Immanuel Kant

A young Immanuel Kant (the Becker portrait)
Without communication, love does not exist; without respect, it does not endure. —Immanuel Kant

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Immanuel Kant is often remembered as the driest of philosophers: austere, methodical, and so punctual that the people of Königsberg supposedly set their clocks by his daily walk. Yet beneath the formidable reputation lay a surprisingly warm and personable man. His greatest transformation came not through philosophy, but through friendship.

In his youth and middle age, the sharply dressed Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) moved in Königsberg’s most refined circles and often stayed out into the small hours. In this period, his student Johann Gottfried Herder described him as ‘the most urbane fellow in the world.’

But when Kant turned forty, he underwent a midlife transformation. He quite literally sobered up, abandoning carefree carousing for the disciplined life of the mind. This profound change owed as much to the early death of a close friend, the dissolute Johann Daniel Funk, as to the making of a new friend, the English merchant Joseph Green, who lived by the clock.

Kant essentially adopted Green’s modus vivendi.

Kant’s Daily Routine, and How It Helped Him

For the rest of his productive life, Kant employed a retired soldier, Martin Lampe, to wake him up at precisely five-to-five every morning. Lampe would stride into his master’s bedroom and cry out, “Herr Professor, the time is come!” Or in German, Herr Professor, es ist Zeit!

Kant worked at his desk in his nightclothes until his lectures began at seven. At eleven, he would change back into nightclothes and return to his desk. The working day effectively ended at one, when he would take lunch in company in a public inn or restaurant. Lunch would end at three with a round of manufactured jokes—in the belief that laughter was good for digestion and broader health.

After lunch, Kant would take his daily constitutional around Königsberg. He walked alone, from fear that outdoor conversation would lead him to breathe through the mouth. He often wound up at Green’s, with whom he liked to discuss Hume and Rousseau. It is said that the housewives of Königsberg would set their timepieces by the time—seven sharp—at which he left Green’s house.

By automating trivial daily decisions, Kant’s rigid daily routine freed his mind to focus purely on philosophy. It’s because of Kant that I have six of the same shirt.

Kant’s Jokes and Philosophy of Laughter

What kind of jokes did Kant tell after lunch? Some of his jokes have come down to us in his writing. For instance: A man tried to arrange a solemn funeral for a rich relative, but failed in the task: ‘The more I paid my mourners, the merrier they looked.’ A merchant sailed back from India with his fortune, but, in a violent storm, had to throw all his cargo overboard. This upset him so much that his wig turned grey overnight.

Laughter, Kant thought, “is an affect resulting from the sudden transformation of a heightened expectation into nothing.” The mind is deceived into tensing up, but with the deception revealed suddenly relaxes, leading to laughter, which mimics the motions of the mind and is extremely health-giving. Kant never laughed at his own jokes, but always kept a straight face.

In The Critique of Judgement (1790), Kant quoted Voltaire in saying that Heaven had given us two comforts against life’s hardships, hope and sleep—before suggesting that Voltaire ‘could have added laughter’.

The Death of Joseph Green

In 1786, Joseph Green died, deeply affecting Kant, who thereafter became much more housebound.

After a suitable period of mourning, Kant recruited a female cook and began hosting protracted lunches aimed at stimulating the play of thoughts. To this end, he gathered guests from diverse backgrounds and perspectives, believing that the ideal number of guests lay somewhere between that of the Graces and the Muses (three and nine). All topics great and small were on the table. Philosophy was allowed but not dogmatism, for fear that it would interrupt the convivial flow of ideas.

As well as wine (another of God’s comforts), Kant had a taste for Königsberger Klopse (meatballs in a creamy white sauce with capers), Teltow turnips (an heirloom turnip from the Berlin-Brandenburg region), roast beef, cod, and, as a condiment for the above, English mustard, which he mixed himself in the belief that his special mix protected against senescence.

Kant’s Philosophy of Friendship

Joseph Green was the closest friend that Kant ever had. Green inspired Kant’s routine and became his philosophical sounding board. Kant allegedly discussed every single sentence of the Critique of Pure Reason with Green before publishing it in 1781.

In the Metaphysics of Morals (1797), Kant ended his discussion of character traits just as, in the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle ended his discussion of the same: with an analysis of friendship.

In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle made much of the idea of ‘perfect friendship’, which, he thought, is only possible between people of reason and virtue. He famously described a perfect friend as ‘another self’—later paraphrased by Diogenes Laertius as ‘a single soul dwelling in two bodies.’

Kant deemed ‘perfect friendship’ an ideal that in practice cannot be attained. But in striving for it, we might nonetheless arrive at ‘moral friendship’, in which two persons feel able to disclose their secret thoughts and feelings to each other. Moral friendship requires a savant mélange of love and respect, love for bringing two people together, and respect for not driving them apart by infringing upon their dignity and autonomy.

From his own experience, Kant came to believe that most people cannot develop their true character until middle age, when they might undergo a ‘rebirth’. At twenty, we are no more than the product of our upbringing and environment. At thirty, we are still reliant on the judgement and approval of others. Only at forty are we confident enough (or perhaps tired enough) to become who we truly are.

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Kant’s philosophy cannot be fully understood in isolation. The German Greeks places him within the great tradition of German philosophy, from Leibniz through Hegel and Schopenhauer to Nietzsche—revealing how these thinkers transformed the legacy of ancient Greece.

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The Extraordinary Life of the Buddha

Prince Siddhartha (the Buddha) escapes his palace on horseback
The Buddha’s life has the structure of a mythical hero’s journey.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Essay substantially revised on 17 August 2026.

The Buddha began as a prince whose father tried to protect him from every human suffering. For almost thirty years, his father succeeded. But one night, after sighting an old man, a sick man, and a corpse, the prince made his escape.

The Buddha’s dates are uncertain and range from 624 BCE (earliest birth) to 368 BCE (latest death). Whatever his dates, he is said to have lived for some eighty years. Buddhism emerged amid a broader culture of renunciation and philosophical experimentation that challenged aspects of the established religion, Vedic Brahmanism.

His followers came to revere him as more than an ordinary man and, accordingly, mythologised his life. It would be profitless to try, if that were possible, to separate the mythology from the reality. In any case, the mythology is as invaluable as the history, revealing how the Buddha came to be seen and interpreted.

Exceptional Birth

According to tradition, Siddhartha Gautama, later known as the Buddha, was born in Lumbini, in what is now southern Nepal, to King Shuddhodana of the Shakya clan. His mother, Mahamaya, dreamt of a white elephant with six tusks entering her right side. Ten lunar months later, while strolling in a garden in Lumbini, she grabbed onto the drooping branch of a sal tree, and Siddhartha (‘He who has achieved his goal’) emerged fully formed from under her right arm. Siddhartha proceeded to take seven steps before announcing that this would be his last life.

Two Destinies

Seven days later, Mahamaya died. The court astrologers predicted that Siddhartha would become either a chakravartin(universal monarch) or a buddha (enlightened one). Not wishing to lose his son and heir—and, at that, a future chakravartin—to a life of renunciation, Shuddhodana confined him to a life of luxury within the precincts of the palace, where he would not be exposed to religious teaching or human suffering. At the age of sixteen, Siddhartha married the beautiful princess Yashodhara, and everything seemed on track for a life as a chakravartin.

But Shuddhodana’s attempts to shelter Siddhartha spectacularly backfired. For when the prince did finally encounter human suffering, it came to him as a revelation.

Four Sights

At the age of 29, having tired of the delights of the royal kitchen and harem, Siddhartha asked to make a chariot ride through the city. The king consented but had all the old, infirm, and otherwise poor cleared from the route. Even so, Siddhartha did, for the very first time, catch a glimpse of an old man. He asked Channa, his charioteer: ‘Am I also subject to this?’

With his curiosity piqued, Siddhartha made three more outings, seeing, in turn, a diseased man, a decaying corpse, and, finally, a meditating mendicant, whose serene smile inspired him to join the path in search of freedom from suffering.

The four encounters, known as the Four Sights, shattered Siddhartha’s illusions. The old man, the sick man, and the corpse were images of his own future—and of the future of everyone he loved. But although one could not prevent ageing, sickness, and death, perhaps one could prevent the suffering that comes with them. 

The Great Departure

Siddhartha renounced his position, wealth, and family to take up the life of a wandering ascetic. As night fell and he prepared to make his escape, he was told that a son had been born to him. He went into Yashodhara’s chamber to look upon his sleeping wife and son and named the boy Rahula (‘Fetter’).

That night, in what has come to be called the Great Departure, Siddhartha escaped from the palace on his beloved horse, Kanthaka, accompanied by his faithful servant, Channa.

Having crossed the Anoma River into the forest, he sent the reluctant Channa back along with his weapons and jewels, and even his hair. He sent back Kanthaka too, who died from a broken heart.

A Beggar in the Forest

In the forest, Siddhartha adopted the life of a mendicant, or beggar. He practised successively under two meditation teachers before, with five friends, subjecting himself to extreme forms of self-mortification, progressively reducing his daily meal to a single grain of rice.

One day, he accepted a bowl of milk-rice from a woman called Sujata, who had mistaken the skeletal ascetic for a wish-granting tree spirit. With some food in the belly, he concluded that extreme asceticism would not advance him along the path to freedom from suffering, but serve only to cloud his mind.

The prince who had rejected luxury now rejected its opposite. Neither indulgence nor self-mortification offered the answer. Between the two lay what he would call the Middle Way.

Sandstone head of the fasting Buddha, whom Sujata mistook for a wish-granting tree spirit. Gandhara, second or third century CE. British Museum, London. The Greco-Buddhist Gandhara school produced the first representations of the Buddha in human form, ending the early period of aniconism in Buddhism.

Enlightenment

On the full moon of May, six years after having left the palace, the 35-year-old Siddhartha sat in meditation under a peepul tree. The demon Mara tried to disrupt him, including by sending his daughters to seduce him.

When Mara challenged his right to occupy the ground on which he sat, Siddhartha touched the earth with his right hand, and the goddess of the earth confirmed with a tremor that he had earned this right—on account of a great gift that he had made in his previous life as Prince Vessantara.

Through the night, Siddhartha had visions of his many, innumerable past lives. At dawn, he attained enlightenment. The prince who had escaped the palace had become the Buddha, ‘the Awakened One’.

The peepul tree, Ficus religiosa, is now better known as the Bodhi tree, and the place where the Buddha sat in meditation as Bodh Gaya (‘Place of Enlightenment’). Representations of the Buddha often include his earth-touching gesture, known as the bhumisparsha mudra.

First Sermons

The Buddha remained in the vicinity of the Bodhi tree to savour his enlightenment. When a seven-day storm blew up, the serpent king Mucalinda encircled him seven times with his coils and sheltered him with his seven-headed hood.

At first, he hesitated to teach. What he had discovered seemed too subtle to communicate to people lost in desire and attachment. But the god Brahma Sahampati implored him to share his secrets. 

After seven weeks by the Bodhi tree (note the preponderance of the number seven), the Buddha got up to teach. He delivered his first sermon in the deer park at Sarnath, on the outskirts of Kashi (modern-day Varanasi), preaching the Middle Way between luxury and austerity, the Four Noble Truths, and the Eightfold Path.

In his second sermon, he presented his doctrine of anatman (no-self). So eloquently did he speak that, upon hearing him, his five ascetic friends rose up into arhats (those who have gained such insight as to escape the cycle of rebirth). They became the first members of the Buddhist monastic order known as the sangha.

Naga-enthroned Buddha, Angkor, twelfth century CE.

Life on the Road

For the next 45 years, the Buddha spread his teachings across northeast India, followed by wandering ascetics and laypersons who supported the ascetics. Although many of his followers imitated him in renouncing the life of the householder, most were not so ambitious.

Over the years, many of the renouncers settled into monasteries funded by prominent members of the laity. The Buddha delivered many of his discourses in the monastery of Jetavana in Shravasti, the capital of Kosala, which had been donated to him by the banker Anathapindada.

When Mahamaya’s sister Mahapajapati, who had raised Siddhartha after his mother’s death and became his stepmother, asked to be ordained, the Buddha refused her, perhaps owing to fears about the safety of nuns. But when pressed, he relented, and Mahapajapati became the first bhikkhuni (Buddhist nun). In time, Yashodhara, too, became a bhikkhuni. When Rahula asked for his patrimony, his father ordained him a monk.

However, the Buddha refused to appoint his radically austere cousin Devadatta as his successor. Bitterly aggrieved, Devadatta tried three times to kill him by means of assassins, a boulder, and an elephant, which arrested its charge to bow at his feet. The schism was repaired when the earth sucked Devadatta down into Naraka, or Hell.

Death

In Kushinagara, the Buddha, now around 80 years old, ate a meal containing sukara-maddava, an obscure term that has variously been interpreted as pork, mushrooms, or some other delicacy. He became gravely ill and prepared for death.

His chief disciple, Mahakashyapa, ignited the funeral pyre, after which his relics were distributed and enshrined in large mound-like structures called stupas.

According to Buddhist tradition, in the third century BCE, the Mauryan emperor Ashoka gathered the relics from seven of the eight stupas and erected 84,000 stupas to distribute them across India. Some of Ashoka’s stupas, such as the Great Stupa at Sanchi and the Dhamek Stupa at Sarnath, remain important pilgrimage sites.

Enlightenment had not exempted the Buddha from growing old, falling ill, and dying. What had changed was his relationship to those things. You can read about his most important teachings—the Middle Way, Four Noble Truths, and the Eightfold Path—in my article, The Buddha’s Solution to Desire and Suffering.

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If this essay spoke to you, you might look into Indian Mythology and Philosophy.

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