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Spinoza’s
Monism sources? 1. What we can and cannot know about Spinoza’s sources Spinoza’s
library and correspondence were modest, and much of it was lost after his
death (1677). No Indian or Islamic manuscripts are listed among his surviving
books. Yet he read widely in Latin, Hebrew, Dutch, and a little Arabic,
and lived in a cosmopolitan environment (Amsterdam–The Hague) saturated with
the newly circulating reports from the East. What is certain: ·
He read Maimonides, Gersonides,
and other Jewish rationalists. ·
He knew Descartes intimately (his first
treatise was Principia Philosophiae Cartesianae). ·
He was conversant with Stoicism, Neoplatonism,
and Renaissance Hermeticism. ·
He almost certainly encountered Giordano Bruno
indirectly, whose pantheistic monism anticipates Spinoza in tone and
structure. What is probable
but unprovable: ·
He was aware of Arab–Persian
mystical monism, notably Ibn ʿArabī
and Averroes, through Latin intermediaries. ·
He may have been exposed, through travelers’ reports, Jesuit letters, or secondary
anthologies, to Indian ideas — especially those filtered through Francis
Xavier’s reports (1540s), Henry Lord’s Display of Two Foreign Sects
(1630), and Abraham Roger’s De Open-Deure
tot het verborgen Heydendom
(1651) — all printed in Dutch before or during Spinoza’s lifetime. That last
book, Roger’s Open Door to the Hidden Paganism, describes Hindu
doctrines including Brahman and Ātman,
the transmigration of souls, and the liberation of the jīvanmukta.
It circulated in Amsterdam when Spinoza was a young man. While we have no
direct note of his having read it, it is plausible that he encountered the
idea of the liberated-in-life sage through such channels. 2. Doctrinal comparison: Spinoza and the jīvanmukta
Spinoza’s
amor Dei intellectualis thus parallels the Upanishadic
insight “Aham Brahmāsmi” (“I am Brahman”) in psychological effect if
not in metaphysical structure. Both describe release through insight,
the end of alienation between self and whole, and the cessation of reactive
passion. 3. Key textual resonance Spinoza
writes in Ethics V, prop. 36, scholium: “The
mind’s intellectual love of God is part of the infinite love with which God
loves himself… Therefore this love of the mind
towards God is the very love with which He loves himself.” The Kaṭha and Maitrī
Upaniṣads describe the liberated sage as
one who “Sees the
Self in all beings and all beings in the Self.” and “Though
he moves, he never moves; though he acts, he remains untouched.” The
parallel is remarkable: both speak of an identity that transcends
opposites, an immanent totality that knows itself through its modes. 4. Philosophical distinction Yet the
underlying logics differ. ·
Spinoza’s identity is logical and ontological. ·
The Upanishadic identity is experiential and
metaphysical. Hence
Spinoza remains a rational monist, not a mystic in the Indian sense.
His love of God is the mind’s cognition of necessary relations, not a
suprarational absorption in the Absolute. 5. Possible channels of indirect influence ·
Neoplatonism and the Kabbalah already
transmitted concepts structurally akin to Vedānta:
the emanative One, the identity of intellect and intelligible, the ladder of
return. ·
Jewish–Christian Hermeticists
such as Pico della Mirandola and Giovanni
da Fano spoke of a “prisca theologia”
uniting East and West. ·
These intermediaries could have delivered, in
diluted form, ideas close to Tat Tvam Asi. Therefore,
even without direct textual transmission, Spinoza could re-invent a
comparable structure because the logic of monism forces similar
conclusions: 6. The Finnian critique Finn
would likely say: Spinoza’s “To know that one is in God” freezes the
recognition into static ontology—a cognitive rest, just like the jivanmukta.
Finn’s “I AM … this” is instead procedural recognitions:
dynamic, momentary actualisations of the universal procedure (rather than
state). Where
Spinoza’s liberated mind rests in knowing, Finn’s coherent self iterates in/as the experience of knowing. Thus, if
Spinoza unknowingly rediscovered an Upanishadic insight, he still rationalised
it into stillness—converted ātmanic
awakening into geometric comprehension. Finn’s “I
AM … this” returns the insight to motion: the local iteration of the
universal Procedure, alive and aware of its doing. 7. Conclusion No
documentary proof ties Spinoza directly to the Upanishads, but the structural
convergence is undeniable. The Dutch world of his time was porous to
Eastern ideas; and the logic of pure immanence itself tends to reproduce the
intuition that the knower and the known are one. Spinoza’s
“to know that one is in God” mirrors the jīvanmukta’s
“I am Brahman”. The Indian sage awakens into freedom (from Samsara,
from becoming); Spinoza’s philosopher awakens into eternal becoming. And Finn,
arriving after both, translates the same realization into the language of
discontinuous physics: The sage
of substance says, “I am in God.” Each
phrase describes the same recognition refracted through a different ontology — being
eternal, being absolute, and being in process. |