I WROTE ON THIS SOMETIMES BACK. TODAY I READ R K MUTT TEXT WRT VIVEKANANDA SPINOZA THOUGHTS WHICH SHALL ELEVATE OUR THINKING K RAJARAM IRS 11626
RECONSTRUCTING VIVEKANANDA’S LATER SPINOZISTIC-VEDĀNTIC ARGUMENT AGAINST FREE WILL SWAMIJI MEDHANANDHA R K MUTT In the previous section, after examining Chakrabarti’s three objections to Vivekananda’s argument for the nonexistence of free will in his 1896 class on “Freedom,” I concluded that Vivekananda’s argument is, indeed, vulnerable to Chakrabarti’s second and third objections but not to his first objection. However, Chakrabarti overlooks the fact that Vivekananda presented an interestingly different—and, in my view, better—argument for the nonexistence of free will four years later in his lecture “I Am That I Am,” delivered in San Francisco on March 20, 1900.4 In this lecture, Vivekananda maintains that human “life and mind” are just as much a part of nature as plant and nonhuman animal life are: Nature is the quality of the plant, the quality of the animal, and the quality of man. Man’s life behaves according to definite methods; so does his mind. Thoughts do not just happen, there is a certain method in their rise, existence and fall. In other words, just as external phenomena are bound by law, internal phenomena, that is to say, the life and mind of man, are also bound by law. When we consider law in relation to man’s mind and existence, it is at once obvious that there can be no such thing as free will and free existence. We know how animal nature is wholly regulated by law. The animal does not appear to exercise any free will. The same is true of man; human nature also is bound by law. The law governing functions of the human mind is called the law of Karma. (CW8, 244) This passage strengthens my rebuttal of Chakrabarti’s first objection to Vivekananda’s 1896 argument against free will. Just as external natural phenomena like stones and planets are strictly governed by laws like gravity and thermodynamics, the internal natural phenomena of human life and mental activity are equally strictly governed by the law of karma. Since willing is a mental activity, the will cannot be free, since it is the effect of an antecedent cause in strict accordance with the law of karma. In the next paragraph, he presents a more systematic argument against free will on the basis of the law of karma: Nobody has ever seen anything produced out of nothing; if anything arises in the mind, that also must have been produced from something. When we speak of free will, we mean the will is not caused by anything. But that cannot be true, the will is caused; and since it is caused, it cannot be free—it is bound by law. That I am willing to talk to you and you come to listen to me, that is law. Everything that I do or think or feel, every part of my conduct or behaviour, my every movement—all is caused and therefore not free. This regulation of our life and mind—that is the law of Karma. (CW8, 245) On my reconstruction, Vivekananda’s four-premise argument runs as follows (the letter “V” in the numbered premises standing for “Vivekananda”): V1. A free will is a will that is not caused by anything. V2. Everything that exists must have a cause. V3. According to the law of karma, everything I do, think, or feel at present is caused by something I myself did, thought, or felt in the past and has, in turn, certain consequences—either good or bad—for me in the future. V4. Therefore, everything that occurs in the mind—including the act of willing—must have a cause. V5. Therefore, the will is not free. This is a considerably more streamlined argument than Vivekananda’s 1896 argument, which Chakrabarti rightly criticized. Chakrabarti’s second and third objections to the 1896 argument, we should recall, targeted Vivekananda’s claim that the human mind superimposes causal laws onto the world and his claim that Nyāya upholds this anti-realist view of causality. However, in his later 1900 version of the argument, Vivekananda conspicuously—and, I think, wisely—refrains from making either of these claims. Hence, his 1900 argument against free will is not vulnerable to Chakrabarti’s second or third objections. Moreover, although this 1900 argument does appeal to the law of karma, I argued in the previous section that Chakrabarti’s objection to Vivekananda’s understanding of karma as a natural law is unconvincing. Hence, I now invite Chakrabarti to evaluate Vivekananda’s 1900 argument, which I find significantly more promising than the 1896 argument already discussed by Chakrabarti. In the remainder of this section, I will try to clarify, and reflect a bit on, each of the main premises of Vivekananda’s 1900 argument against free will. Before doing so, however, I think it is worth noting that his argument bears a striking resemblance to Spinoza’s much earlier argument against free will. This resemblance is, perhaps, not a coincidence, as Vivekananda had studied Spinoza, among many other Western philosophers, as an undergraduate student of philosophy at Scottish Church College in Kolkata in the 1880s.5 I hope that a brief excursus into Spinoza’s argument will help us to appreciate some of the nuances of Vivekananda’s argument and set into relief what is most distinctive and original about it. Spinoza’s basic argument for the nonexistence of free will is as follows: “In the mind there is no absolute, or free, will, but the mind is determined to will this or that by a cause which is also determined by another, and this again by another, and so to infinity” (Ethics IIP48; Curley 1985, 483). He argues that the will is not free, since the will itself is the effect of an antecedent mental event, which is itself the effect of another antecedent mental event, ad-infinitum. To make this a complete argument, we need to supply some further implied premises, which are stated explicitly in other places in his work. Here is my very rough reconstruction of Spinoza’s three-premise argument against free will (the letter “S” in the numbered premises standing for “Spinoza”): S1. A free will is a will that is “determined to act by itself alone.”6 S2. “Nothing exists of which it cannot be asked, what is the cause (or reason) [causa (sive ratio)], why it exists.”7 S3. Therefore, all mental volitions must have causes, which are themselves the effects of other antecedent causes, ad infinitum. S4. Therefore, a free will does not exist. Spinoza clarifies S1 by adding that something is not free if it is “determined by another to exist” (Ethics Id7; Curley 1985, 409). S2 is Spinoza’s formulation of the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR), which he justifies by appealing to a version of the principle ex nihilo, nihil fit: “Since existing is something positive, we cannot say that it has nothing as its cause” (Descartes’s Principles of Philosophy, Ia11; Curley 1985, 246). S3 follows from S2. Spinoza clarifies S3 as follows: “Men think themselves free, because they are conscious of their volitions and their appetite, and do not think, even in their dreams, of the causes by which they are disposed to wanting and willing, because they are ignorant of [those causes]” (Ethics I, appendix; Curley 1985, 440). In other words, we mistakenly think we are free when we act on our desires, because we don’t realize that our volitions were caused by desires that were not, in fact, chosen by us—and those desires, in turn, were caused by other antecedent causes not chosen by us either, ad infinitum. S4, the conclusion, follows from S1 to S3: there is no free will. Keeping Spinoza’s argument in mind, let us now come back to Vivekananda’s 1900 argument, considering each of the four premises (V1–V4) in turn. Regarding V1, what exactly does Vivekananda mean when he defines a “free will” as “a will that is not caused by anything”? Prima facie, he seems to be saying that a free will is a will that has no cause. However, the problem with this prima facie interpretation is that a will that has no cause would be a random, freak occurrence rather than a free will. In light of the context of Vivekananda’s statement, I think it is much more plausible to take V1 to mean that a free will is a will that is not caused by anything other than itself. Taken in this way, V1 is essentially identical to Spinoza’s S1: “A free will is a will that is ‘determined to act by itself alone.’ ” Likewise, Vivekananda’s V2—“Everything that exists must have a cause”—is almost identical to S2, Spinoza’s PSR. Also like Spinoza, Vivekananda justifies V2—his version of the PSR—by appealing to the principle of ex nihilo, nihil fit: “Nobody has ever seen anything produced out of nothing.” This particular formulation of the principle might seem to be inductive in nature (“nobody has ever seen …”). But I think V2 should actually be taken as a stronger a priori metaphysical claim—one that he makes on numerous other occasions. As Vivekananda puts it elsewhere, “nothing can be created out of nothing” (CW2, 208), and “nothing comes without a cause” (CW2, 207). In short, Vivekananda reasons, like Spinoza, that everything that exists must have a cause, since something cannot come from nothing. It is in V3 that Vivekananda gives a distinctly Vedāntic twist to his otherwise Spinozistic argument for the nonexistence of free will. For Vivekananda, the causal law of karma is an instance of the more general law of universal causation affirmed in V2.8 According to V3, the law of karma completely governs “everything that I do or think or feel, every part of my conduct or behaviour, my every movement” (CW8, 245). For instance, if I react to a slight by losing my temper and shouting, that act of losing my temper and shouting was strictly determined by something I myself had done, thought, or felt, either earlier in this life or in a previous life, in accordance with the law of karma. It is important to note that Vivekananda upholds a strongly deterministic view of karma, in contrast to some other Vedāntin thinkers, who hold that the law of karma accommodates some degree of free will. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (1908, 425), for example, claims that the law of karma explains why we are born with certain “tendencies” that we are “tempted” to follow, but we are nonetheless free, in the present, not to succumb to these inborn tendencies and to rise above them instead. Unlike Vivekananda, then, Radhakrishnan would hold that if I react to a slight by losing my temper and shouting, the tendency to lose my temper was the karmic result of my own past behavior, but I still had sufficient free will not to lose my temper, even if controlling my temper might have been extremely difficult. What is Vivekananda’s justification of the doctrines of karma and rebirth affirmed in V3? In a recent article (Medhananda 2022b, 81–4), I have discussed in some detail his three primary arguments in support of these doctrines, so I will only summarize them here. First, he argues that if we assume the existence of a “just and merciful God,” we cannot reconcile God’s goodness with “this world of inequalities” unless we accept karma and rebirth (CW4, 269). The law of karma, for instance, explains why some children are born into highly favorable circumstances, while other children are “born to suffer, perhaps all their lives” (CW4, 269). Second, he argues that many creatures exhibit innate tendencies, qualities, and skills from birth (or shortly thereafter)—such as a newly hatched chick’s innate “fear of death” and a newly hatched duckling’s ability to swim—that could only have been developed in a previous life (CW2, 220–2). Third, he claims that anyone can attain knowledge of their past lives through the practice of a special yogic discipline described in Patañjali’s Yogasutra 3.18 (“saṃskārasākṣātkaraṇāt purvajātijñānam,” which Vivekananda translates as “By perceiving the impressions, [comes] the knowledge of past life”) (CW1,276). Since our unconscious contains the latent impressions (saṃskāras) of the things we did and thought not only in this life but also in our past lives, we can gain knowledge of our past lives by concentrating intensely on these saṃskāras as prescribed in the Yogasutra. Indeed, Vivekananda even claims that “each one of us will get back this memory [of past lives] in that life in which he will become free” (CW2, 219). For Vivekananda, V4—which is virtually identical to Spinoza’s S3— follows directly from V2, just as Spinoza’s S3 follows directly from S2. As Vivekananda puts it, “if anything arises in the mind, that also must have been produced from something.” Evidently, in three of the four premises of his 1900 argument (namely, V1, V2, and V4), Vivekananda is channeling his inner Spinoza—though, again, it’s not clear whether Vivekananda was directly influenced by Spinoza’s argument.9 As we have seen, however, Vivekananda differs from Spinoza in upholding V3, the law of karma, taking it to be an instance of V2. In Vivekananda’s argument, then, V4 follows independently from V3 as well as from V2. The conclusion, V5, follows from V1–V4. This, in a nutshell, is my interpretation of Vivekananda’s 1900 argument for the nonexistence of free will—which I consider to be a stronger and more streamlined argument than the 1896 argument rightly criticized by Chakrabarti. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ K RAJARAM IRS 11626 -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Thatha_Patty" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/thatha_patty/CAL5XZoqH9iFaiiNOj8F%2By0-Tz7wnP1O3sZL83iW8uei%3D-Jzssw%40mail.gmail.com.
