Spinoza - The Yogi

Benedict de (Baruch) Spinoza was one of the leading rationalists during the Enlightenment. Following Descartes, Spinoza’s metaphysics and epistemology intended upon stretching the rationalist point of view to the extreme. Despite having a similar system of enquiry as Descartes, Spinoza rejected his theory of dualism (mind & body) and established “substance” as the basic essence of everything that exists. At this point, Spinoza’s “substance” started gaining resemblance to Shankara’s version of “Brahman” (Ultimate Reality). As we dwell further within the realms of Spinoza’s metaphysics, the striking resemblance to the Eastern religions like Hinduism and to some extent Buddhism become apparent.
Spinoza describes “substance” as something “’in itself and conceived through itself’” or “’that the conception of which depend upon the conception of another thing from which it must be formed’” (Scruton 52). From this’ statement, “substance” can be interpreted as something that has an independent existence. The argument for this conjecture goes something like this – A. No two substances can share the same essence (attributes). B. There is a substance with infinite attributes (God). From these two premises, the conclusion arises that since God has all the attributes, there can be no other “substance”. Like Descartes before him, Spinoza had to rely on God for the validity of his argument. Later on, Spinoza extended his theory to explain real life situations and came up with a logical, if somewhat odd, description. According to his Dual Aspect theory, the mind and the body, both having a select few attributes of the “Substance”, work isochronously without any apparent causation. Being made out of the same “substance”, the “idea” (mind) and the “Extension” (body) do not interact with each other at any time. According to Scruton’s interpretation of Spinoza, “while we can assert in the abstract that they [the mind and the body] are identical, we can never explain a physical process in terms of a mental one, or a mental process in terms of a physical on” (55); the two processes here are analogous to two parallel lines which never intersect. For Spinoza, the causation for everything appears to be the divine plan of God which we, being mere mortals, are too inferior to perceive. All we have is just an intuitive knowledge of God. Thus, Spinoza’s metaphysics leaves no place for free will. This renders all study of ethics or morality useless as without the notion of free will, no one can be held accountable for anything. Although logically valid, we can see that Spinoza’s metaphysics leads to more queries than solutions.
Moving to Hinduism, the same disagreement regarding dualism ensues between the Vedantins. Vedantins practiced Vedanta which according to Knott is “a philosophical system in which scholars have focused upon the study of Vedic texts concerning ultimate reality (Brahman)” (31). There were 3 eminent Vedantins – Shankara, Ramanuja and Madhva. Among these 3, Shankara’s idea about the “Brahman” resembles that of Spinoza’s “Substance”. Shankara founded the concept of Advaita which means “non-duality” in Sanskrit. To Shankara, “Brahman” and “Atman” (self) were the same things and one of his prime challenges was to identify the reasons why people failed to realize this. Like Spinoza and Descartes, Shankara accounted for the fact that our senses can be fooled. These incorrect sense perceptions give us the feeling that we have a self (Atman), but in reality, Atman and Brahman are the same things. In his book, Knott mentions “[For Shankara] Liberation was achieved by removing ignorance, learning to discriminate between what was eternal and what only masqueraded as such, and then acquiring knowledge of the self identity with Brahman” (32). Shankara’s metaphysics was influenced by the rising religious threat posed by contemporary Buddhism. This explains why the path to attain liberation (Moksha) is somewhat similar to Buddhist Nirvana. Shankara’s way of liberation was again synonymous with Spinoza’s idea of tranquility in a deterministic world. Spinoza claimed that the only way to attain tranquility is through knowledge and the acceptance of divine determinism. In short, accepting the world as it is given to us would free your ‘self’ (Atman) of stress or worries and thus you would achieve tranquility or according to Shankara, attain “Moksha”. Shankara’s non-dualist perspective does not leave any room for free-will either. One can only acknowledge the hand of God behind everything which would in turn free their ‘self’. Looking at all these similarities, one can well call Shankara ‘The Spinoza of the East’.
Thus, we can see that the philosophy of Spinoza resembles to a large extent that of Hindu philosopher Shankara. They seem to agree on metaphysical questions of non-duality and determinism. Both rely on God for the validity or soundness of their arguments. If not for the lack of a proper information channel between the East and the West during Spinoza’s era, Spinoza might be charged guilty of plagiarism.



Works Cited
Knott, Kim. Hinduism: A Very Short Introduction. New York : Oxford University Press (UK), 1998.
Scruton, Roger. A Short History of Modern Philosophy. New York: Routledge, 2002.