Spinoza Through the Prism of Later ‘East-West’ Exchanges: Analogues of Buddhist Themes in the Ethics and the Works of Early Spinozists

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.