freewill and fate

[Rajaram Krishnamurthy]

KR    Long ago I wrote on karma-fate and Freewill; now Ramakrishna and Vivekananda also say Karma is powerful than freewill. Now in their own words below.    KR IRS 14526

 THINKING WITHOUT BORDERS

Vivekananda’s argument, which Chakraborty  would paraphrase as follows: Chakraborty opposes Vivekananda on laws of Karma:

1. The moral law of karma—according to which moral acts result in

happiness and immoral acts result in suffering—is not a form of

natural causation, since one end of the causal chain involves the nonnatural value terms “good” and “bad.”

2. It is simply not the case that happiness is always seen to be the result

of virtuous actions, while suffering is always seen to be the result of

vicious actions. Therefore, Vivekananda is mistaken in claiming that

the human mind superimposes causal laws, including the law of karma,

onto the world due to its past experience of patterns of succession.

3. Vivekananda also mistakenly imputes this anti-realist view of causality

to the Nyaya school of philosophy, which does, in fact, accept that

causal relations actually exist in the world independently of our

perception of it.

     According to Vivekananda, Nyāya conceives vyāpti as the expectation that a perceived sequence of cause and effect will occur again in the future.  Nyāya actually conceives vyāpti as the  “invariable relation between universals, which undergirds causal regularities of  various sorts.” To explain our knowledge of vyāpti, later Naiyāyikas hold that we are able—through a special kind of extraordinary perception—to apprehend all of the individuals that instantiate a universal. Dasti helpfully explains this late Nyāya view by appealing to the example of the invariable relation between fire and smoke:  Unless one’s experience of some particular smoke instance as conjoined with a fire instance allows him to experience all instances of smoke qua smoke as being conjoined with all instances of fire qua fire, through the natural tie between the universals smokiness and fieriness, inductive extrapolation would be impossible. Nyāya thus solves the problem of induction by appeal to extraordinary perception. (Dasti n.d.: 1.a.ii)

        Vivekananda did not seem to be aware that the Nyāya doctrine of vyāpti involves an extraordinary perception of all the individuals that instantiate a universal, a perception that helps validate a core tenet of Nyāya’s metaphysical realism—namely, that laws of nature are not mind-imposed but objectively “out there” in the world. On Chakrabarti’s first objection.

  Let’s let him  formulate his objection in his own words so as to minimize the risk of straw manning him: That virtuous acts bring about happiness of [sic: should be “or”] that all painful experience must be due to past acts which are morally  reprehensible— seems quite obviously not an instance of straight physical causal law, simply because one end of the causal link involves the non-natural value-terms “good” and “bad.” (Chakrabarti 1994, 15)

Chakrabarti argues that Vivekananda is mistaken in taking the law of karma to be a natural causal law, since good and bad actions, which are the cause of happiness and sufferig, respectively, involve the non-natural value-terms “good” and “bad.” This would be a serious objection, as it calls into question Vivekananda’s core argument for the absence of free will: namely, that all human behavior is strictly governed by the deterministic causal law of karma.

  Vivekananda clarifies the kind of causation involved in the law of karma as follows:

Psychologically the word Karma also implies causation. Any work, any action, any thought that produces an effect is called a Karma. Thus the law of Karma means the law of causation, of inevitable cause and sequence. Wheresoever there is a cause, there an effect must be produced; this necessity cannot be resisted, and this law of Karma, according to our philosophy, is true throughout the whole universe. Whatever we see, or feel, or do, whatever action there is anywhere in the universe, while being the effect of past work on the one hand, becomes, on the other, a cause in its turn, and produces its own effect.

The law of karma, according to Vivekananda, involves psychological causation, since mental events—including thinking, willing, and the intentions behind our bodily and verbal actions—play an essential role in the causal story. Crucially, however, Vivekananda subscribes to the standard Indian philosophical view that the mind itself is a subtle form of matter and that the mind only appears to be conscious due to the conscious soul (Ātman or Puruṣa) illuminating it.

As he puts it, “Mind, intelligence, will, and everything else is insentient. But they are all reflecting the sentiency, the ‘Cit’ [Consciousness] of some being who is beyond all this, whom the Sāṃkhya philosophers call ‘Puruṣa’ ” (CW2, 450). For Vivekananda, then, even mental events are physical events, insofar as the mind itself is a subtle form of insentient physical matter. Hence, from Vivekananda’s Vedāntic standpoint, the special kind of psychological causation involved in the law of karma is, indeed, a form of natural causation.

In the italicized final sentence of the passage quoted in the previous paragraph, Vivekananda of Karma means the law of causation, of inevitable cause and sequence. Wheresoever there is a cause, there an effect must be produced; this necessity cannot be resisted, and this law of Karma, according to our philosophy, is true throughout the whole universe. Whatever we see, or feel, or do, whatever action there is anywhere in the universe, while being the effect of past work on the one hand, becomes, on the other, a cause in its turn, and produces its own effect. (CW1, 94; emphasis mine)

The law of karma, according to Vivekananda, involves psychological causation, since mental events—including thinking, willing, and the intentions behind our bodily and verbal actions—play an essential role in the causal story. Crucially, however, Vivekananda subscribes to the standard Indian philosophical view that the mind itself is a subtle form of matter and that the mind only appears to be conscious due to the conscious soul (Ātman or Puruṣa) illuminating it.

As he puts it, “Mind, intelligence, will, and everything else is insentient. But they are all reflecting the sentiency, the ‘Cit’ [Consciousness] of some being who is beyond all this, whom the Sāṃkhya philosophers call ‘Puruṣa’ ” (CW2, 450). For Vivekananda, then, even mental events are physical events, insofar as the mind itself is a subtle form of insentient physical matter. Hence, from Vivekananda’s Vedāntic standpoint, the special kind of psychological causation involved in the law of karma is, indeed, a form of natural causation.

In the italicized final sentence of the passage quoted in the previous paragraph, Vivekananda clarifies how all the links in the causal chain of karma are either grossly physical events (like bodily and verbal actions) or subtly physical events (like thoughts, feelings, perceptions, and willings). Perceptions, feelings, willing, and actions are all subtly physical events that are caused by earlier grossly physical events (“past work”) and themselves are the causes of subsequent grossly physical and subtly physical events. Let us take a concrete example: A person P steals money from the purse of an elderly woman W when she’s not looking. According to Vivekananda, P’s physical act of theft is strictly governed by the causal law of karma. He might explain the causal process roughly as follows. P’s (grossly physical) act of stealing the money was caused by his (subtly physical) willing to steal, which was itself caused by certain (subtly physical) beliefs and desires—say, the desire to take the woman’s money, coupled with the belief that taking her money will make him happy and help alleviate his poverty. Moreover, P’s act of theft is an immoral action that will result in P’s future suffering—specifically, P’s mental (i.e., subtly physical) suffering and potentially also P’s grossly physical suffering—either later in P’s current embodiment or in a future embodiment. (For instance, P’s subtly physical suffering could consist of feelings of guilt, inner torment, depression, or anger, and P’s grossly physical suffering could consist of bodily pains resulting from a physical disease like cancer.) Notice, then, that all the links in the karmic causal chain are either grossly physical events or subtly physical events. Since the psychological causation involved in the law of karma is a form of strictly natural causation, I think Chakrabarti’s first objection to Vivekananda’s argument for the nonexistence of free will misses its mark.

2. RECONSTRUCTING VIVEKANANDA’S LATER SPINOZISTIC-VEDĀNTIC ARGUMENT AGAINST FREE WILL

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”):

V      1. A free will is a will that is not caused by anything.

V        2. Everything that exists must have a cause.

V      3. 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.

V 4. 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.

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 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.”

S2. “Nothing exists of which it cannot be asked, what is the cause (or reason) [causa (save ratio)], why it exists.”

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 principal 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, nihilfit: “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 saṃskārasas 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.

3. GOD’S FREE WILL AS OUR OWN: RAMAKRISHNA, VIVEKANANDA, AND THE ULTIMATE STANDPOINT OF VIJÑĀNA

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)  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?

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!’]. 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.

   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; 2010, 376)

Ramakrishna upholds hard theological determinism, the incompatibilism view hat 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 living, 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 ofGod Herself. Since the vijñāni knows that she is not different from God, God’sfreedom 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 as they 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, thelaw 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.

4. ANTICIPATING SOME OBJECTIONS TO VIVEKANANDA’S VIEWS ON FREE WILL AND DETERMINISM

Of course, Vivekananda’s complex, three-tiered position on free will and

determinism raises numerous questions and invites a whole host of objections.

Indeed, if we just restrict ourselves to Vivekananda’s 1900 argument against free will, each one of its four premises can be challenged. Compatibilists, for instance, would object to V1, arguing that free will is compatible with causal determinism if we conceive free will differently—for instance, as the ability to do what one wants” (McKenna 2019, 2.1). In the very limited space that remains, I will only consider here two possible objections to V3 (the deterministic law of karma), which is clearly the most original and provocative premise in Vivekananda’s argument.

First, a defender of Radhakrishnan’s view of karma might question

Vivekananda’s strictly deterministic view of karma in V3, arguing that a

conception of karma that accommodates some degree of free will is more

reasonable. I think we can defend Vivekananda against this objection by arguing that he is simply drawing out the logical consequences of the law of karma,which has universal scope with respect to all human thought, feeling, and action.Let us revisit Radhakrishnan’s own example of someone who has a karmically conditioned tendency to lose her temper but who, with great difficulty, is able freely to rise above that tendency. From Vivekananda’s standpoint, this person’s difficult act of self-restraint was not actually free but was itself determined by her own past karma. This person had, as a result of her own past behavior, a karmically conditioned tendency to lose her temper as well as a karmically conditioned tendency to control her temper, and the latter karmically conditioned tendency overpowered the former because it was the stronger of the two tendencies. A defender of Radhakrishnan might change tacks, at this point, by questioning Vivekananda’s view that all of our thoughts, feelings, and actions, without exception, are strictly determined in accordance with the law of karma.

If some instances of human thinking, feeling, and acting are not determined by the law of karma, then there still seems to be scope for some amount of free will.

Vivekananda, however, could respond that the law of karma is a law precisely because its universal scope brooks no exceptions, and it is simply ad hoc to limit the universal scope of the law of karma in order to accommodate free will.

Second, a Spinozist might ask why Vivekananda even bothered to build such a controversial premise as V3 into the argument in the first place. Why not inferthe nonexistence of free will directly from V1, V2, and V4, as Spinoza himself did? According to Spinoza’s S3, all mental volitions must have causes, which are themselves the effects of other antecedent causes, ad infinitum. A Spinozistmight argue that S3, in conjunction with S1 and S2, is sufficient to establish the nonexistence of free will. I imagine that Vivekananda would be happy to concede to the Spinozist that we can infer the nonexistence of free will from V1, V2, and V4, but he added V3 in order to clarify precisely how and why a particular mental volition is caused by a particular desire and why that samemental volition, in turn, causes one to behave in a particular manner.

Let’s conclude by summing up the main arguments of this somewhat circuitous chapter. I began by noting Chakrabarti’s three primary objections to what he calls Vivekananda’s 1896 “Kantian kind of argument” against free will (1994,

14). I agree with Chakrabarti that his two objections targeting Vivekananda’s highly questionable claims about Nyāya philosophy and causality as a mental projection do significantly undermine the argument’s plausibility. At the same time, I argue that Chakrabarti’s third objection—namely, that the law of karma is not a natural law since it involves nonnatural value terms like “good” and “bad”—misses its mark, since Vivekananda explains how all karmic causes and effects are, in fact, strictly natural. I then contend that Chakrabarti overlooks Vivekananda’s much better, and more streamlined, Spinozistic-Vedāntic argument against free will presented four years later in 1900—one in which neither Nyāya philosophy nor mental projection of causal laws plays any role.

However, I suggest that Vivekananda’s 1900 Spinozistic-Vedāntic argument

against free will comprises only a part of his broader views on free will and

determinism vis-à-vis the law of karma. Following his guru Ramakrishna,

Vivekananda distinguishes three standpoints: that of the non-realized person, that of the jivanmukta who knows that God alone is the Doer, and that of the vijñāni who realizes that God alone exists. The non-realized person, Vivekananda claims, is psychologically incapable of believing that there is no free will or moral responsibility, believing instead in a weaker version of the law of karma, according to which we do have some degree of free will and are, therefore, morally responsible for our actions, even though our past karmic conditioning can make it very difficult to change our present behavior.

By contrast, the jivanmukta, who has realized God, knows that God alone is the Doer and, therefore, that the law of karma precludes free will and moral responsibility altogether. Vivekananda further suggests, however, that there is an even further stage of spiritual realization—referred to by Ramakrishna as “vijñāna”—that includes, but exceeds, the jivanmukta’s realization of Godas the Doer. The vijñāni realizes that God alone exists and, therefore, that it is God Herself who playfully manifests as everything and everyone in the universe. Since the vijñāni realizes nothing less than her identity with God, she thereby discovers that she is, in fact, free and morally responsible for her actions—albeit not as an empirical individual but as God Herself.

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Bharadwaj N., Krishna. 2019. “Will According to Swami Vivekananda: A Literary Review.” International Journal of Yoga—Philosophy, Psychology and Parapsychology,7: 29–33.

Medhananda, Swami. 2022a. Swami Vivekananda’s Vedāntic Cosmopolitanism.New York: Oxford University Press.

Medhananda, Swami. 2022b. “From Good to God: Swami Vivekananda’s Vedāntic Virtue Ethics.” International Journal of Hindu Studies, 27: 67–96.

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