3. GOD’S FREE WILL AS OUR OWN: RAMAKRISHNA,VIVEKANANDA, AND THE ULTIMATE
STANDPOINT OF VIJÑĀNA SWAMI MEDHANANDHA R K MUTT
For Vivekananda, then, the law of karma precludes any possibility of free
will. In a bracing passage from his 1895 Inspired Talks, he further infers
the nonexistence of moral responsibility from the nonexistence of free will:
Give up the notion that man is a responsible being, only the perfect man is
responsible. The ignorant have drunk deep of the cup of delusion and are
not sane …. Remember always that only the free have free will; all the rest
are in bondage and are not responsible for what they do. (CW7, 99)
Presupposing that free will is necessary for moral
responsibility, Vivekananda argues that since we don’t have free will, we
are not morally responsible for our actions.
However, at various other places in his work, he appeals to the law of
karma to justify moral responsibility for our actions and our present
circumstances.
Take, for instance, this passage from his 1896 lecture on “The Highest
Ideal of Jñāna Yoga”:
It is our fault that we suffer. Whatever we sow we reap …. Man is born
poor, or blind, or some other way. What is the reason? He had done
something before, he was born that way. The jiva [individual soul] has been
existing for all time, was never created. It has been doing all sorts of
things all the time.
Whatever we do reacts upon us. If we do good, we shall have happiness, and
if evil, unhappiness. (CW1, 397) Here, he holds that the law of karma
entails that we alone are morally responsible for our innate tendencies and
our present favorable or unfavorable circumstances. Doesn’t he contradict
himself by affirming moral responsibility on the basis of the law of karma
while also denying moral responsibility on the basis of the very same law
of karma?
In fact, he addresses something very much like this objection in the
following dialogue with his friend Priya Nath Sinha:
Swamiji [Vivekananda]: “Who is responsible [dāyi ke] for every action you
do, every breath you take, and every thought you think? Isn’t it you
yourself?”
The friend: “Yes and no. I cannot understand this clearly. I think the
truth is expressed in the Gitā: ‘tvayā hṛṣikeśa hṛdisthitena [yathā niyukto
’smi tathā karomi]’
[‘I do as You direct me to do, O Krishna, who are seated in my heart!’].10
So when I am directed by His will, I am not at all responsible for my
actions.”
Swamiji: “That is true only from a very high spiritual standpoint [oṭā baḍo
ucca avasthār kathā]. When the mind will be purified by work and you will
see that it is He who is causing all to work, then only you will have a
right to speak like that. Otherwise it is all bosh, a mere cant.” (CW7,
274–5; translation modified)
Vivekananda distinguishes two standpoints here. From the standpoint of
spiritual realization, we have no free will and, therefore, are not morally
responsible for any of our actions. However, so long as we have not
attained this realization, we cannot help but feel that we are free and
morally responsible for our actions. Even if we claim to believe, and
verbally profess, that God alone is the Doer and we are merely His
instruments, it is “all bosh, a mere cant” so long as we have not realized
God.
He says this even more emphatically in his 1896 lecture “The Free Soul”:
Every one is as much bound in thought, word, deed, and mind, as a piece of
stone or this table. That I talk to you now is as rigorous in causation as
that you listen to me….Men, however sharp and intellectual, however clearly
they see the force of the logic that nothing here can be free, are all
compelled to think they are free; they cannot help it. No work can go on
until we begin to say we are free. (CW3, 14)
On my understanding of Vivekananda, then, non-realized people lack the
psychological capacity to believe in the full-blooded law of karma (V4),
which precludes free will and thereby also precludes any moral
responsibility. These non-realized people are only capable of believing in
a weaker version of the law of karma—such as Radhakrishnan’s version
discussed in the previous section. Recall that according to Radhakrishnan’s
view of the law of karma, our present tendencies are the karmic effect of
our own past actions, but we are nonetheless free to modify our ingrained
tendencies—even though it may be extremely difficult for us to do so—by
changing our behavior in the present. For Radhakrishnan, then, the law of
karma holds that we reap what we sow—insofar as our present behavior and
circumstances, either favorable or unfavorable, are the karmic result of
our own past behavior—but this karmic conditioning does not amount to
causal determinism, so there is still room for some degree of free will
and, therefore, moral responsibility.
Vivekananda would hold that so long as we have not realized God, we can
only believe in such a weaker version of the law of karma, which entails
that we are free and morally responsible for our actions. It is from this
standpoint that Vivekananda states, “It is our fault that we suffer.
Whatever we sow we reap” (CW1, 397). However, once we have realized God, we
realize the truth of V4—namely, that there is no free will and we are,
therefore, not morally responsible for our actions.
In light of my interpretation, it might seem puzzling why Vivekananda
claims, in the passage from Inspired Talks quoted in the previous
paragraph, that “only the perfect man is responsible” and that “only the
free have free will.” Don’t these statements contradict his claim elsewhere
that those who have attained the highest realization have neither free will
nor moral responsibility?
To appreciate the complexities and nuances of Vivekananda’s position, I
think it is helpful to acquaint ourselves first with his guru Ramakrishna’s
views on free will and determinism, which I have discussed in detail in a
separate article (Maharaj 2018). Ramakrishna expresses his views on free
will and determinism in the following passage:
It is God alone who does everything. You may say that in that case man
may commit sin. But that is not true. If a man is firmly convinced that God
alone is the Doer and that he himself is nothing, then he will never make a
false step.
It is God alone who has planted in man’s mind what the “Englishmen” call
free will [svādhin icchā]. People who have not realized God would become
engaged in more and more sinful actions if God had not planted in them the
notion of free will. Sin would have increased if God had not made the
sinner feel that he alone was responsible for his sin.
Those who have realized God are aware that free will is a false appearance.
In reality, I am the instrument and God is the Operator [vastutaḥ tini
yantri, āmi yantra], I am the carriage and God is the Driver. (Gupta 1992,
379–80;010, 376)
Ramakrishna upholds hard theological determinism, the incompatibilist view
that we have no free will since God alone is the Doer, accomplishing Her
ends in this world by using us as Her instruments. Strikingly, however, he
also holds that God, in Her infinite wisdom, has endowed all of us with the
necessary illusion of free will and moral responsibility so as to prevent
sin from increasing.
Crucially, Ramakrishna distinguishes the standpoints of the ajñāni, the
jivanmukta, and the vijñāni. The ajñāni (ignorant or non-realized person)
must believe that she has free will and is, therefore, morally responsible
for
her actions. By contrast, the jivanmukta, one who has attained liberation
while iving, knows that God alone is the Doer and, therefore, that no one
is truly free and morally responsible for their actions. However, the
jivanmukta is incapable of committing unethical actions, since she has
completely destroyed egoism and accordingly merged her individual will with
God’s Will. As Ramakrishna puts it, “A person becomes a jivanmukta when he
knows that God is the Doer of all things ….Where is a person’s free will?
All are under the will of God” (Gupta 1992, 159; 2010, 126).
However, Ramakrishna also holds that iśvarakoṭis—a spiritual elite
consisting only in “incarnations of God and those born as a part of one of
these incarnations” (Gupta 1992, 749; 2010, 800)—are able to attain the
panentheistic mystical experience of “vijñāna,” which is even greater than
the jivanmukta’s realization of God as the Doer. According to Ramakrishna,
the vijñāni realizes that “it is Brahman that has become the universe and
its living beings” (Gupta 1992, 104; 2010, 51). From the vijñāni’s
standpoint, God Herself sports in the form of unenlightened and enlightened
people as well as everything else in the universe. The vijñāni sees that
there is nothing but God and, consequently, that Her creatures are nothing
but different guises of God Herself. Therefore, while the jivanmukta
realizes that God alone is the Doer, the vijñāni exceeds even the
jivanmukta’s realization by partaking of God’s own absolute freedom, since
the vijñāni knows that she herself is God in a particular form. As
Chakrabarti aptly puts it, “When I realise that I am made of the
kite-flying mothers’ own elements—or even [more] accurately I am she— her
[the Divine Mother’s] freedom automatically becomes mine” (1994, 26).
In sum, according to Ramakrishna, the ajñāni must hold the mistaken belief
that she is free and morally responsible for her actions, but the
jivanmukta realizes the truth that God is the Doer and that she is merely
God’s instrument.
The vijñāni, however, realizes that she and everyone else are different
forms of God Herself. Since the vijñāni knows that she is not different
from God, God’s freedom becomes her own.
Vivekananda, I would suggest, follows his guru in distinguishing these
three standpoints. As we have already seen, he holds that non-realized
people must believe that they are free and morally responsible for their
actions so long asthey have not attained the highest realization of God. By
contrast, realized people—whom Ramakrishna refers to as
jivanmuktas—recognize the truth that God alone is the Doer and that they
are merely Her instruments and, therefore, neither free nor morally
responsible for their actions. Of course, Vivekananda’s karma-based
arguments against free will that we have been discussing in this chapter do
not make any appeal to God. However, in the dialogue quoted above, he does
affirm hard theological determinism when he claims that “it is He who is
causing all to work” and agrees with his friend, who says that “I am the
instrument and the Lord is the agent,” and therefore, that “I am not at all
responsible for my actions” (CW7, 274). Elsewhere, Vivekananda declares in
a Ramakrishnan vein that “we are but puppets in the Lord’s hands” (CW6,
246).
The key to connecting Vivekananda’s hard theological determinism to his
1900 karma-based argument against free will is his assumption—articulated
in numerous other places—that God is the dispenser of the fruits of our
karma (karmaphaladātā), who has created, and continues to uphold and
enforce, the law of karma. He clearly articulates this assumption in the
following passage describing “the Infinite Mother of this universe”:
She is the power of all causation. She energises every cause unmistakably
to produce the effect. Her will is the only law, and as She cannot make a
mistake, nature’s laws—Her will—can never be changed. She is the life of
the Law of Karma or causation. She is the fructifier of every action. Under
Her guidance we are manufacturing our lives through our deeds or Karma.
(CW5, 433)
>From Vivekananda’s hard theological determinist standpoint, then, God
employs us as Her instruments through the law of karma, which She herself
has created to achieve Her ends.
However, Vivekananda also follows Ramakrishna in accepting the even
greater standpoint of the vijñāni, who realizes that God alone is
everything and everyone in the universe (Medhananda 2022, chapters 1 and
2). Vivekananda explains the vijñāni’s realization in passages such as this
one from his lecture “The Cosmos: The Macrocosm” (1896):
We now see that all the various forms of cosmic energy, such as matter,
thought, force, intelligence and so forth, are simply the manifestations of
that cosmic intelligence, or, as we shall call it henceforth, the Supreme
Lord.
Everything that you see, feel, or hear, the whole universe, is His
creation, or to be a little more accurate, is His projection; or to be
still more accurate, is the Lord Himself. It is He who is shining as the
sun and the stars, He is the mother earth …. He is the speech that is
uttered, He is the man who is talking. He is the audience that is here. He
is the platform on which I stand, He is the light that enables me to see
your faces. It is all He. (CW2, 207–11)
Like Ramakrishna, Vivekananda holds that the vijñāni realizes that she
herself is none other than God, so God’s Free Will is, in fact, her own
free will. As he puts it in his lecture “The Goal” (1900), “The meaning of
God is entirely free will …. He is infinite by His very nature; He is free”
(CW2, 465). Hence, when the vijñāni realizes her true nature as God, she
partakes of God’s own Free Will. It is, I would suggest, from this
standpoint of vijñāna that Vivekananda declares, in the Inspired Talks
passage already quoted, that “only the perfect man is responsible” and that
“only the free have free will” (CW7, 99). The “perfect man” here is not the
mere jivanmukta—who has realized that God alone is the Doer—but the
vijñāni, who has realized her identity with God and, therefore, who is
truly free and morally responsible for her actions as God.
Let me now sum up my reconstruction of Vivekananda’s rather complicated,
and multifaceted, position on free will and determinism vis-à-vis the law
of karma, in light of Ramakrishna’s teachings and Vivekananda’s own
numerous apparently conflicting statements on the issue. Vivekananda, I
would suggest, distinguishes three standpoints. People who have not
realized God are psychologically incapable of believing in the full-blooded
law of karma (Vivekananda’s V3 from his 1900 argument against free
will)—which entails that we have neither free will nor moral
responsibility—and, hence, can only believe in a weaker form of the law of
karma, according to which we are sufficiently free to change our present
behavior in spite of our past karmic conditioning and are, therefore,
morally responsible for our actions. By contrast, people who have realized
God—whom Ramakrishna refers to as jivanmuktas—realize the truth of the
full-blooded law of karma: namely, that there is neither free will nor
moral responsibility. However, Vivekananda also follows his guru in holding
that some people—whom Ramakrishna refers to as vijñānis—attain the even
greater realization that they are none other than God Herself, thereby
partaking of God’s own Free Will.
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K RAJARAM IRS 11626
On Thu, 11 Jun 2026 at 08:30, Rajaram Krishnamurthy <[email protected]>
wrote:
> 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
>
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