Abstract
Spinoza wrote his philosophical works without a direct knowledge of Asian philosophical traditions, but many Spinozists following in his wake, as well as some notable critics, were both knowledgeable about, and sympathetic to, aspects of Chinese philosophy, a tradition that included key elements of the Buddhist no-self ontology. Spinoza’s Ethics can be seen as touching on the connection between no-self and compassion that is central to Buddhist philosophy. In that chef d’oeuvre of Spinoza’s, there are arguably two corresponding elements: an ontology of transpersonal substance that relegates individuals to a merely ‘modifying’ status and – as a putative implication of that metaphysics – an ethics of rational altruism (developed in the latter half of the Ethics). We consider some interpretations that contest this notion of ‘altruism’ and some that contest the idea that there is such an implication; but we also consider favourable interpretations, including some that explicitly draw a comparison with Buddhist ethics. These interpretive debates are then compared to debates about Spinoza in the century following his lifetime. Pierre Bayle famously criticized his metaphysics, meanwhile explicitly – and unfavourably – comparing it to a ‘quietist’ strain in Asian philosophy that was in fact a variant of Chinese Buddhism. Later, Denis Diderot acknowledged a similar comparison, but reversed Bayle’s verdict, suggesting that Spinozist and Chinese philosophies ran parallel and that both deserved serious consideration. When Diderot’s view was echoed among the German idealists who took Spinoza’s side in the Pantheismusstreit (a key philosophical controversy at the end of the eighteenth century), a new element strengthened the cross-cultural comparison, namely the enthusiastic reception of the first Sanskrit texts in Europe, which were understandably seen by those idealists as reinforcing a version of the no-self conception that had been noticed earlier by Bayle, as a parallel to Spinoza’s metaphysics.
We wish to thank both the anonymous referees for their comments, and the following people for helpful correspondence and conversations: Charles Goodman , Sandy Hinzelin , Simon Kow , Mitia Rioux-Beaulne , Mark Siderits , Erik Stephenson , Angela Sumegi and all of our fellow contributors to this volume.
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Notes
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- 3.
Perhaps any risk of ‘Orientalism’ , meanwhile, can be mitigated in proportion to the number of primary sources that one is able and willing to consider (charitably, but also critically, in context). The lack of such sources prior to Herder’s time is one thing that makes something like ‘Orientalism’ , ill-defined though it may be, a factor in the period we cover here.
- 4.
For that matter, it is an altruism that contrasts with classical Greek and Hellenistic models as well. We will not consider the alleged Stoic roots of Spinoza’s ethics; but implicitly, our interpretation does cast doubt on (the role of) a eudaimonistic approach , which was common to almost all of Hellenistic ethics.
- 5.
Siderits 2003 , 37. Siderits sometimes treats these models as optional frameworks for practical or moral deliberation; but we consider them here as ontologies .
- 6.
Siderits, 42 . The medieval Muslim philosopher Averroes was notorious for similar ideas, amounting to variations on so-called ‘monopsychism ’, which already encompassed two different claims: that minds can fuse (at least in the afterlife ) vs. that the one and only primeval mind never underwent fission in the first place. In relation to both Buddhism and Spinoza , it is the latter idea that seems in play. (We note Spinoza’s familiarity with Averroes below.) Montaigne ([1580] 2003, 497) cites Virgil to express a similar idea; and Bayle (1697), in note (A) to his “Spinoza” article, relates the “âme du monde” idea to both Stoic and Indian philosophies (see n. 23 below, regarding Bayle’s sources on India).
- 7.
The Yogācāra school can be said to go beyond monopsychism , embracing panpsychism as well (as reflected in the ‘Citta-matra’ (mind-only ) label that has traditionally been attached to it).
- 8.
Vasubandhu makes this remark in Part V of his Madhyānta-Vibhāga-Bhāṣya (here cited in the Anacker translation), i.e. in his Yogācāra works, not his earlier works.
- 9.
The moral conclusion follows in the next verse (8:102): Suffering “must be warded off simply because [it is] suffering. Why is any limitation put on this?” (‘BCA’ abbreviates Bodhicaryāvatāra , translated in Śāntideva (1995) .)
- 10.
One might ask: is there any evidence of a move from ‘oceans’ to a single, all-encompassing ‘ocean’? Śāntideva is aware of this option, and perhaps leaves it to the Yogācārin after all, as his dialogue with a Citta-matra exponent suggests (9: 11–34).
- 11.
Although he uses the phrase “you must have…”, verse 137 addresses itself impersonally to ‘Mind ’, suggesting that the resolve is constructed in personal terms but mandated by an impersonal source.
- 12.
That is, this is an important issue in ethical theory , even if the idea of sacrificing human rights in the name of consequentialism should be deemed unwise (or worse) in practical ethics.
- 13.
Pt II D7 adds: “if a number of Individuals so concur in one action that together they are all the cause of one effect, I consider them all, to that extent, as one singular thing.” It is perhaps not clear whether this lends itself to a ‘Weltgeist ’ approach; but in any case, we see below that Spinoza sees continuity of memory as relevant to the concept of personal identity , which leaves this notion of ‘singularity’ – insofar as it applies to bodies – of uncertain significance with regard to personal identity. (All further quotations from Spinoza are from his Ethics (Curley trans . in Spinoza [1677] (1985).)
- 14.
To avoid prematurely placing Spinoza in the Weltgeist camp, we should note that he is here using the term “Individual ” in the sense of a singular thing, as opposed to the sense of a person. Nonetheless, his claim amounts to a kindred sort of monism .
- 15.
Even these considerations might be subordinate to the more robust normative framework that emerges in Part V – which raises the question whether correct evaluations are (at best) determined by non-relative desire , or are subject to non-relative determination (independent of desire in any usual sense). We address the key ideas of ‘eternal mind ’ and ‘love of God’ , at the end of this section.
- 16.
For the record, Spinoza could not possibly have read any works by Śāntideva – who was first translated into French in the late 1800s, and into English in the early twentieth century. Apart from the travel reports of Jesuits, in fact, he could not have been exposed to any Buddhist writings. But as Jay Garfield points out in his chapter, the medieval sources available to seventeenth-century philosophers reflected a wide range of ancient authors. Not only might some Greeks and Romans have read Buddhist sources (see also Emily McRae’s remarks on Seneca ); there would also have been a wealth of information about India in medieval Spain, where Averroes lived. Spinoza knew of Averroes’ ideas via Elijah Delmedigo (Fraenkel 2012, 205 ff.) .
- 17.
Spinoza appeals to IV P37 in the Demonstration that follows this proposition.
- 18.
A stipulation that a Spinozist (even a Spinozist guided mainly by Part V) can let stand, perhaps; although it seems infelicitous. ‘Good’ is such a paradigmatically thin normative term, that it would surely be better to allow that perfection or blessedness are good in a non-relative sense – indeed, as in ‘highest good’.
- 19.
A full assessment of this interpretation (in terms of projections of imagination) might require addressing the notion of adequacy of ideas, something we do not have space for here. It must be admitted, in any case, that Wetlesen seems to be assuming something along the lines of the subjectivist reading of (the account of attributes in) Spinoza , a reading proposed by Hegel , and later, with greater attention to Spinoza’s texts, by Wolfson (1934) . Many interpreters have rejected this reading, but it has received more favourable treatment in recent years; see e.g. Newlands (2011) and Della Rocca (2012). Even if one is inclined to dismiss this reading, however, it is historically relevant here nonetheless, since, as we shall see, German idealists (with a tendency to read Spinoza in the same way Hegel did) played a key role in combining Spinozist metaphysics with ethical ideas that they claimed to find echoes of in ‘Eastern’ mysticism .
- 20.
A complaint along these lines is voiced even by Schopenhauer , an admirer of Spinoza’s : “[T]he ethics in Spinoza’s philosophy does not… proceed from the inner nature of his teaching… though in itself it is praiseworthy and fine” (Schopenhauer 1969, 284). Our position on Spinoza is the inverse: we think that at least one aspect of his ethics (his defence of benevolence ) may well follow from his core metaphysics ; but unlike Schopenhauer, we suspend judgment on both elements of his philosophy.
- 21.
Atipada is Sanskrit for step-too-far. As Davis (2018) proposes, it could be used to refer to a particular pitfall in some kinds of anti-realist philosophy , where an anti-realist about certain categories of entity wishes to deploy this anti-realism in the service of ethics while also extending the scope of the anti-realism in such a way that they – inadvertently – debunk the very notion(s) of normativity that their (or perhaps any) ethics would seem to require. It need not be the departure from common sense that causes the problem, of course; the self-defeating move might instead result from a departure from some deep meta-ethical presupposition of moral discourse.
- 22.
Beyond counselling ‘caution’, we will not attempt here to resolve either this question, or the similarly pointed question of whether Spinoza has an ontology that is so reductive that it cannot accommodate truths about intrinsic value or inherently moral obligation (which could be worrying even for some who are not concerned to safeguard ‘moral engagement’). To do so would be to confront large issues about monism and its compatibility with distinctions between normative and descriptive properties, the latter issue being perhaps anachronistic in this context. Nonetheless, these issues are not entirely out of place here: see the discussion of Malebranche below.
- 23.
Bayle (1697) did show an interest in Asian culture and religion for its own sake, in at least two other articles, “Brachmanes” (about India ) and “Japon” – which connects a few dots with Chinese religion and philosophy, but like others at the time, he seems not to have traced the specifically Buddhist thread back to its origins. (See also Kow 2016 , with respect to Bayle and Chinese texts.) One of Bayle’s sources was François Bernier’s Suite des Mémoires sur l’Empire du grand Mogol ([1671] 2008), who links the idea of an “âme du monde” to Hindus, Sufis and Stoics (2008, 341 & 358).
- 24.
One of the ‘monstrous’ results Bayle illustrates is the ‘Eleatic ’ implication that there can be no such thing as change (or a fortiori, improvement) if this assertion is true.
- 25.
Bayle does not make the fallacious claim that determinism entails fatalism ; rather, he argues that a Spinozist has no way of showing fatalists and quietists to be mistaken (and no right to cite such a fallacy).
- 26.
It is in using the word ‘rectify’ that Bayle perhaps achieves real traction here. After all, there could be a difference between true and false beliefs in such a universe; but what may indeed seem threatened is the normativity of truth (e.g. among other things, any ‘duty to rectify’ errors).
- 27.
Lai (1985) tries to trace the origins of the sect that came to Bayle’s attention under the ‘Fo’ label, identifying one of the Neo-Confucian variations on Buddhist metaphysics as the main source.
- 28.
As always, this depends on which strand of Buddhist philosophy is in question. But one thing seems worth emphasizing: a denial of personal identity does not per se entail the sorts of nihilism and relativism that flirt with incoherence (due to the familiar risk of self-refutation, whatever other dangers they may pose). Or at least, this would seem to hold when the anatta claim is distinguished from claims about global emptiness . Philosophers will disagree about what constitutes an atipada , but one clear sign that most will agree on is that which indicates that a view is self-refuting. Whereas relativism must use the concept of truth (which is problematic for it, yet apparently unavoidable), an anatta ontology need not use the first-person voice; so it would seem that the latter is less likely to be self-refuting.
- 29.
Interestingly, while scholars then and now see Spinoza as unwittingly (if at all) echoing Chinese ideas , many have argued that Leibniz knowingly incorporated Chinese themes, in ways that are claimed to have had a great impact on Western philosophy and science (Needham (1954), and Jay Garfield, Chap. 6, in this volume).
- 30.
Malebranche [1708] 1992b, 1074; also see the passages from pages omitted in this edition, quoted in part at p. 1367. Although Malebranche is here focusing on Confucian beliefs , the ones he was discussing were of course Neo-Confucian, in this period, and thus greatly influenced by Buddhist metaphysics , which long before had been invoked to fill certain gaps within the more socially oriented Confucian teachings (though Malebranche was probably not aware of this Chinese historical background).
- 31.
Malebranche does this in relation to the epistemology of the cogito rather than as an ontological proposal, in his 1688 Dialogues ([1688] 1997, III: vii). In his Essais, Montaigne had entertained both a ‘Weltgeist ’ conception of the soul ([1580] 2003a, 615), and perhaps more seriously, a punctualist conception, in “On Vanity” ([1588] 2003b, pp. 1091; 1106; 1133; and cf. p. 681, in the “Apology for Raymond Sebond”).
- 32.
Unlike the latter terms, ‘pantheism’ had not been coined until after Spinoza’s time; and while this does not render it useless as an accessory to interpreting the Ethics, it does leave one uncertain where, for example, Spinoza would stand on the merits of pantheism versus panentheism.
- 33.
- 34.
The locus classicus that tackles the enigma(s) and the apparent complexity of Spinoza’s influence on Diderot is Vernière (1954). In connection with the contemporary French context, it is also worth mentioning a few other Spinoza commentators who write in French. André Comte-Sponville has often compared themes from Spinoza with themes in Asian philosophical traditions (e.g. regarding Buddhism, see his 2006, pp. 172–80 & 202–04); and Marcel Conche explores similar terrain, albeit with a different assessment, extending his scope from the ethical to the moral (see his 2016, inter alia, and the discussion of his 1987 in Comte-Sponville’s “Marcel Conche avec et contre Nietzsche” in Comte-Sponville 2015; see also the latter’s “Un anachorète malade”, e.g. the claim that Pyrrhonism represents an “orientalisation de la Grèce” and Spinoza an “occidentalisation de l’Orient ” (2015, 327).) However, these writers have rarely scrutinized the diachronic dimension of personal identity , and at any rate not with close reference to Spinoza. One recent book that addresses implications for personal identity is William Néria’s Plotin, Shankara , Spinoza (2014), though the comparison there is with Shankara (in the Vedanta tradition ), rather than with Buddhist philosophy.
- 35.
For more detail on this, and also on Herder’s moral philosophy, see Sikka (2011) .
- 36.
Sikka (2011) stresses that this could not be the Kantian notion of rationality (if indeed that is an apt term at all here), but meanwhile also stresses the role of benevolence in Herder’s ethics .
- 37.
We have left it open whether any ‘Weltgeist ’ monism of the kind endorsed by thinkers such as Goethe could accurately be attributed to Spinoza ; we also left it open, in section II, whether Spinoza’s metaphysics can rightly be seen as resulting in some sort of anti-realism about individuals (debunking diachronic identity in particular). In n. 19, we noted the ‘subjectivist’ interpretation of Spinoza, which is anti-realist about distinctions between attributes, but could be extended to an anti-realism about finite modes (including individual persons). By exploring post-Kantian idealism , we can now see the significance of that interpretation; i.e. even if it did not fit everything Spinoza wrote, it nonetheless became an important variety of Spinozism in this period, when Buddhist and other Indian forms of monism were also vindicated, on both ‘Spinozist’ and separate ethical grounds.
- 38.
We acknowledge that categorizing Bayle as Christian is somewhat problematic (especially where his philosophy is concerned); meanwhile we follow Todd Ryan (2009) in calling him a moral realist , even though this is a problematic interpretation as well.
- 39.
- 40.
As some deep ecologists might say (see Chapter 13 for contemporary views in ecology with either Spinozist premises – somewhat akin to Schleiermacher’s – and/or Buddhist premises).
- 41.
As for his ethics, though, see the chapter in this volume by Douglas Berger (Chap. 8).
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Davis, G.F., Renaud, M.D. (2018). Spinoza Through the Prism of Later ‘East-West’ Exchanges: Analogues of Buddhist Themes in the Ethics and the Works of Early Spinozists. 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_5
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