Studies In Comparative Philosophy

by Swami Krishnananda

Spinoza's view that God is a thinking and extended being requires a higher clarification and amendation according to the Vedanta. To say that God is thinking and is extended would be to make God a spatial entity. If God is in space, He is temporal and finite, and if He is not in space, He cannot be extended or have the need to think of anything. Thinking is always of something, and thinking in God can be accepted only when it is raised to the status of the activity of pure Consciousness in its own being and not considered as a faculty of mentation which requires an object outside it. God has to be really beyond space and time, for He is infinite. In the philosophy of the Vedanta, God and the Absolute have to be theoretically distinguished from each other. God is Ishvara, and the Absolute is Brahman. Ishvara, however, in His aspects of the Consciousness underlying the causal, the subtle and the gross universes is said to be defined by the characteristics of the universe. Thought and extension are not attributed even to Ishvara in the ordinary sense of these terms. No doubt, we speak of the Cosmic Idea or Will arising in Ishvara, but it is not an idea of any external object, not a will that determines anything outside itself. Ishvara is above space and time, for He is prior to the creation of the visible universe. Extension is divisibility and divisibility admits of change. Not only this; extension is an object of sense-perception. But Ishvara, or God, is not an object of the senses. When we attribute the characteristics of the temporal universe to Ishvara, we do not make Him an object of the senses, for He is infinite in nature. There is a great difference between the conception of Ishvara in the Vedanta and that of God in the system of Spinoza. Ishvara in the Vedanta is merely the objective counterpart of the individual's perceptions and experiences, logically deducted and accepted on the ground of the necessity of positing Brahman, or the Absolute, on the one side, and of taking for granted the visible universe of physical bodies on the other. The nature of Ishvara, therefore, is determined by the logical necessities arising from individual experience in the relative universe. What is experienced in individual perception is not necessarily a part of the Cosmic Reality, but the need for a satisfactory explanation of the implications of individual experience necessitates a transference of the contents of individual experience to the constitution of the Cosmic Reality. This transference, of course, is purely the result of individual necessity. Thought and extension are not considered to be essential aspects of Ishvara, but they are posited as necessary characteristics of His constitution merely to offer an explanation of the implications of human experience. It does not, however, mean that there is an 'objective' Ishvara absolutely independent of Brahman, mediating between the Jiva, or the individual, and Brahman, the Absolute. Else, the immediate salvation of the individual on the rise of perfect knowledge would be impossible and it would become necessary for every individual to get lodged in the state of Ishvara. Ishvara is Brahman itself visualised from the point of view of individual experiences. If there are no individuals, there cannot be an Ishvara, too; there would be only Brahman. But Spinoza's God has thought and extension as His necessary attributes. This God, thus, would be subject to spatial divisibility and become finite.

Spinoza merges God in the world and does not allow of a transcendent aspect of God. If the universe and God are one, the changes characteristic of the universe would be present in God, too. When God is subject to change and modification, He becomes finite, again. The Vedanta preserves the transcendent aspect of God, which remains unaffected by the changes that occur in the universe. Moreover, the universal changes are only apparent from the point of view of Reality, so that there is no possibility of God's being affected by the changes in the world. For the Vedanta, God is not exhausted in the world. His eternal aspect shines beyond the dust of the earth.

Spinoza identifies the Will of God with the totality of causes and laws and the intellect of God with the totality of minds in the universe. If God were but a sum total of all individual constitutions, the errors and defects present in them would also be present in God. The universe is characterised by ignorance, error, change, modification and death. The causes and laws in the universe are seen to be relative and not absolute. The minds of individuals are possessed of limited knowledge, and that too, of external things alone, and not of the essential reality of things. An accumulation of many finites cannot give us the Infinite. God is not merely an aggregate of the imperfect individuals and their laws. God is superior to the individuals, not only in quantity but also in quality. God, in the Vedanta, is not a sum total of individual beings, but the original or prototype consciousness, of which the individuals are limited and distorted reflections. As the defects of the reflections do not affect their original, so the defects of the individuals do not affect God – so holds the Vedanta. The individuals have a twofold defect: they are limited – this is quantitative deficiency; they are also distorted reflections – this is qualitative deficiency.

Spinoza denies free-will and establishes strict determinism. Human willing is determined by another cause, that by another cause, and thus ad infinitum. Man has the wrong notion that he is free, because he is unable to know the causes that direct his will. It is this ignorance on his part that is the cause of his being affected by censure, praise, pain, pleasure, etc. Spinoza compares the free-will that man seems to have to the thinking of a stone, if it were endowed with thought, that the positions which it occupies when it is thrown into space are chosen by its own free-will. In the philosophy of the Vedanta we have a blending together and a reconciliation of determinism and free-will. According to it, the universe as the manifestation of Ishvara is eternally determined by the Will of Ishvara. The past, present and future are all eternally fixed by His Cosmic Will. No individual, by any stretch of effort, can bring about the least change in this eternally determined universe of Ishvara's Will. But there is free-will. Free-will is the consciousness of independent individual agency which is given rise to by the Will of Ishvara when it manifests itself and works through the egoism of the individual. As long as this appearance of free-will is the sole director of the life of the individual, so long will the latter be responsible for its actions. The moment universal knowledge dawns in the individual, it rises above its notion of independent free-will and gets identified with the Will of Ishvara. In this universal identification consists the real freedom of the individual. The greater the approximation of the knowledge of the individual to the universal knowledge of the fact of the absolute supremacy of the Will of Ishvara, the greater is the freedom that the individual enjoys.

Spinoza's determinism has, of course, its higher ennobling side which attempts to free man from his petty individualism and unrestricted passions, and to make him understand that all events in the universe are parts of a perfection that is the whole. Spinoza feels that we would have no occasion to find fault with one another, to get angry or discontented, if only we could enter into the knowledge of the self-determined perfection of Nature and God. Guilt and error are results of ignorance of the universal perfection that reigns over the scheme of things, and Spinoza advises that though we punish evil-doers, we ought to have no hatred towards them, for they perpetrate evil on account of lack of real knowledge. We may add here that the punishment usually inflicted on evil-doers is more a measure against elements disturbing social peace than a process of educating the evil-doers, though there is no denying that many a time fear of punishment becomes an important factor in one's practice of virtue and goodness.

The great good that Spinoza tries to do by his theory of determinism is to enable man to bear the brunt of all pains and misfortunes with serenity, peace and an inner strength, and to be free from the emotions of joy when something desired takes place; for Nature is no respecter of persons or things; it is strictly impartial, and its love consists in law. God is both a kind mother and a stern father. This higher determinism is to be seen brilliantly expounded in the Vedanta, too. With such knowledge one becomes fit for the contemplation of the essence of things, which Spinoza calls the 'Intellectual Love of God'. It is intellectual love, rational love, love based on understanding, and not the emotional love which surges as a result of instinctive pressures. This divine contemplation requires as its pre-condition a knowledge of the greatness of God and the perfection of His Nature, which is manifest as the laws of the universe. 'All for the best' – this spirit should animate a person after he does intelligently all that he is capable of doing in the right direction, within the limits of his discriminative reason. Determinism, however, is not a licence for idleness or fatalistic surrender; on the other hand, it is the understanding of the great law that God alone is real and that He alone is capable of doing anything at all. Determinism is the higher phase of things, while an amount of free-will which makes itself apparent in man's life, though it may ultimately be discovered to be a chimera, rules the ways of man, and is indispensable for a well-governed and sensible life. Here we have to bring about a reconciliation between determinism and free-will. Spinoza's determinism which pays no heed to the fact of free-will and which makes the human soul a mode of God's Thought has, however, the sublime intention of raising man to God and divesting him of the wrong notion regarding his own importance in the world. The decision of the will and the determination of Nature coincide in the philosophy of Spinoza, for whom nothing higher than God or even equal to God can ever be. God cannot be loved unless His supremacy is known and accepted. If man, too, has some freedom on his part, then the state of God is not one of absolute freedom. Spinoza's love for God was intense and he did not wish that there should be anything in the world that would diminish this love, even in the least. Man's independent existence is, to him, an illusion. The truth is the oneness of man and his mind with Nature. From the interrelated system of Nature we are made to understand that man's love for God and God's love for man are both the same as God's love for Himself, for man is a mode of God. The highest good and the highest virtue, Spinoza makes clear, consist in the knowledge of God, the supreme Substance. This knowledge is attained in intuition.

Like Aristotle, Spinoza identifies the highest good of the individual with the highest good of the universe. And this highest good is the intuitive knowledge of God. Individualism and altruism, here, coalesce; selfishness is rooted out, for the one good of all is the love of God and the knowledge of God. In all these, Spinoza and the Vedanta are one.