Why was Mauss interested in Spinoza?

Reflections on notions of totality

The orient will appear towards the end – I start with the Durkheimians.

So, why was Mauss interested in Spinoza? The question assumes that he was interested, but
he never says so in so many words. So here are five pieces of evidence for the interest.

1. In the 1890s Mauss was planning to make Spinoza the subject of his minor thesis (which I
believe would have been written in Latin – if it had ever been written, which it wasn’t). At
this time he was in very close touch with Durkheim, his mother’s brother, who was teaching
in Bordeaux; and no doubt the thesis topic was chosen following discussion with his uncle,
who in 1894 lamented Mauss’s failure to make progress on it (Fournier p. 65).

2. Shortly before WWI, in an unpublished text bearing on the value of ethnography in French
Indo-China, Mauss included some advice on how social change could be brought about via
the local beliefs, customs and habits – ‘just as [he says], if one follows Spinoza, one can only
affect one passion via another’ (Fournier 356). I do not know the exact passage Mauss is
recalling, but he is clearly still thinking about the philosopher.

3. In the 1920s, among the students he lectured to, supported and encouraged was Madeleine
Francès, who wrote her thesis on Spinoza’s political thought (Fournier, index s.v.). Published
in 1937, the thesis acknowledged Mauss’s repeated help in connection with the Dutch
literature on the tangled relationships (enchevêtrement) of the parties and sects around the
philosopher. Francès was later one of the three French editors and translators of Spinoza’s
Oeuvres completes.

4. In Mauss’s Manuel d’Ethnographie, Plato and Aristotle each receive four references, but
the only modern mainstream philosopher to be mentioned is Spinoza. In a section on
religious representations he writes: ‘Let us not forget that it was Spinoza who really isolated
thought from space’; previously, matter was never regarded as very material and mind was
never considered as anything very immaterial (p. 245, tr 07: 188).

5 In Mauss’s last major essay, The Person (1938), Spinoza receives a whole paragraph,
dealing with the immortality of the soul, or rather of the part of it animated by the intellectual
love of God. This is the only passage I know where Mauss gives precise references to
Spinoza’s text.

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Of these five pieces of evidence only the first belongs strictly to our period, but the others
confirm that Mauss’s youthful interest in Spinoza was more than a passing phase of his
education. Moreover, as we shall see later, he shared his interest with Durkheim. In 1928
Mauss edited his uncle’s book on socialism -- a text based on lectures given in 1895-6. In this
context we learn that some of Durkheim’s most brilliant students were converted to
socialism, especially in its Marxist and Guesdist forms. In a Circle of Social Studies, ‘some
of them commented on Marx’s Capital, as elsewhere they commented on Spinoza’ (III 507).

Now for the question proper, namely why in the decade that saw the launching of the Année
sociologique were the two main founders interested in Spinoza? I move from the more
obvious among the possible answers towards more abstract conceptual ones.

1. Big name. Spinoza’s dates are 1632-77 (he died when he was only 44). A controversial
figure in his lifetime, he was generally neglected for the next century, but his reputation
recovered in Germany in the late 18th Cy, and in the 19th he was established as a major figure
in the history of philosophy. His standing is comparable that of Descartes and Leibniz, and he
influenced other major figures like Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche (Yovel II).

2. Attractive personality. The first time I read anything substantial on Spinoza was around
Christmas 1954, in Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy. Russell opens his
chapter on Spinoza by describing him as ‘the noblest and most lovable of the great
philosophers’. Other favourable characterisations are easily found. For instance, from the
Oxford philosopher Stuart Hampshire: ‘He had the reputation of being a man of great
courtesy and amenity, and among his neighbours he seems to have been loved and respected;
he was certainly not dour, dull or disapproving’. Spinoza recommends the wise man ‘to
refresh and restore himself in moderation with pleasant food and drink, with scents, with the
beauty of green plants, with decoration, music, sports, the theatre…,’ (Curley 1985: 572 =
Ethics 4p45s). Mauss was less puritan than his uncle, and, at least before WWI, knew well
how to enjoy himself, so the cheerful side to Spinoza may well have attracted him.

3. Jewish roots but free-thinking. Spinoza was born in Amsterdam from Marranos, i.e. Jews
who had been forced by the Spanish or Portuguese to adopt at least a veneer of Christianity.
Spinoza’s father had left Portugal to settle in the freer environment of the Netherlands, and
gave his son, Baruch, a Jewish education. Soon after his father’s death Spinoza’s heterodox
religious views led to his formal excommunication, and thereafter he made his living by
grinding and polishing lenses, devoting the rest of his time to philosophy.

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Similarly, Durkheim and Mauss both had rabbi ancestors and received traditional Jewish
upbringings, but both left their faith. Presumably this predisposed them in favour of Spinoza.
Moreover, just as Spinoza developed his ideas in discussion with a small circle of Christian
sectarian intellectuals with similar interests, so Durkheim and Mauss developed sociology
within the network of Année Sociologique collaborators, many of them Christian.

4. The uncle. This is a paper about Mauss, but obviously the nephew’s interest in Spinoza
will owe something to the uncle’s. Fortunately, I can simply allude to the latter topic since it
is treated at length by Donald Nielsen (1999). As Nielsen says in the first paragraph of his
preface, his focus is on ‘the philosophical problem of totality and an image of [Durkheim’s]
work as the embodiment of a social monism whose central features are strongly reminiscent
of Spinoza’s philosophy’. Note the words ‘totality’ and ‘monism’. Nielsen’s study is not
confined to Spinoza, and examines the relevance of several other predecessors, notably
Aristotle, Bacon, Kant and the neo-Kantian Renouvier (9). But the much lamented Massimo
Rosati was right (2005: 42n34) when, in a list of recent interpretations of Durkheim, he
mentions Nielsen as offering a Spinozan Durkheim while other Durkheims on offer are
Kantian, Bataille-Nietzschian, Aristotelian or Schopenhauerian.

It is difficult in practice and of debatable value to distinguish sharply between the thinking of
uncle and nephew, and Nielsen frequently refers to Mauss. In a sense, much of this paper is a
postscript to Nielsen (first recommended to me by Harriet Lutzky – whom I thank).
Moreover, now that we are about to move to the more abstract issues, a second caveat is
appropriate. A philosophically untrained social anthropologist who dips into the basic texts
and the vast secondary literature on so prominent a figure as Spinoza is evidently taking risks.
But let us take them.

5. Scale and direction of ambition. Spinoza wrote little that is clearly autobiographical apart
from his early and unfinished Treatise on the Intellect (he probably always wrote in Latin,
rather than Dutch, but I use only the translations). This shortish text (37 pages) opens with a
few remarks on his personal motives and ambitions. Most people orient their lives with a
view to wealth, honour or glory, which they love. However, at a certain point, he (Spinoza)
decided to devote himself instead to seeking ‘the true or highest good’ – that is ‘knowledge of
the union that the mind has with the whole of Nature’ (Curley 85: 11); if possible, it is to be
obtained together with other individuals (para 13 of the Treatise). This search for salvation,
through improved understanding of the human condition, underlies his work in general, and

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notably in his best-known book, Ethics, and his Theological-Political Treatise (TPT).
Published anonymously in 1670, (in a century marked by religious wars and the Inquisition)
TPT recommended democracy, conciliation, toleration and freedom of thought (Hampshire
liv). Incidentally in 1962, when the French invaded Holland and the de Witt brothers were
murdered by the mob as appeasers, Spinoza tried to protest at the risk of his own life (ibid
171).

Unlike Spinoza the lens-grinder, who in 1672 refused the offer of a chair at Heidelberg
University (Klever 1996: 42), Mauss was of course working within academic institutions of
research and teaching, but both he and his uncle had objectives that were far deeper than
mere academic success (welcome though this would be as furthering their undertaking).
Their fundamental objective, one can almost say their mission, was to found a well-ordered
academic discipline and, thereby, to contribute to the betterment of society. This is why
Mauss’s best-known text The Gift, ends as it does, with conclusions about morality applicable
to the French society of his day. His study of ethnographic materials allows him in his final
sentences to recommend mutual respect and reciprocal generosity as the basis for organising
society. However, he usually kept his academic writing separate from his political work
(which often related to the Cooperative movement).

6. Using written texts. Of course, for many of Spinoza’s contemporaries the Bible was the
word of God and hence a source of authoritative knowledge. Apart from the Latin he learned
as an adult, Spinoza knew enough Hebrew to write a compendium of its grammar and in TPT
he presented a secular and historical reading of the Old Testament. I summarise the account
by Popkin (1996). The Biblical text, says Spinoza, lacks any supernatural or divine element,
and was written, selected and transmitted by human beings. The testaments were ‘the
fortuitous work of certain men who wrote according to the requirements of their age and their
own particular character.’ The way to interpret them was ‘no different from the method of
interpreting Nature.’ The source of authoritative knowledge was reason, as exemplified not so
much by philosophers like Descartes (of whose views Spinoza published a summary under
his own name in 1663), but above all Euclid.

By the time of Mauss sceptical and historical views of the Bible had of course gained a
secure place within academe, and the paradigms for reliable knowledge were provided by the
physical sciences. Sociology was to form a science analogous to physics, chemistry and
biology, organising our knowledge of social phenomena (often called social facts) and

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analysing them with carefully thought out methods. But Mauss was well aware that social
facts are not, as it were, just lying around waiting to be described: they need to be
‘constituted’ – carefully selected, defined and abstracted which, when one is using texts, is
not necessarily easy. One needs critical methods, varying with the type of document. In his
Inaugural in 1902 (III 463) he praised the critical acumen of his predecessor, Marillier:
‘Every text by a traveller or ethnographer was discussed severely. Was the observer
presenting the truth, was he not distorting the facts, intentionally or not?’ A similar point is
made in the Method section of the encyclopaedia article on ‘Sociology’ which he published
with Fauconnet in 1901 and which was explicitly inspired by Durkheim. In fact, Mauss’s
critical attitude towards the texts he used is already apparent two years earlier in the long
article I call Sacrifice, co-authored with Hubert (cf. Allen 2013). Here is the opening of its
lengthy note 101: ‘We must first of all indicate what texts we are using and what our critical
attitude towards them is.’ Again, in Magic (1904), use is to be made solely of accounts that
are reliable and complete, and so require minimal criticism (SA 7).2

I am not saying that Mauss took his text-critical attitude solely from Spinoza, merely that this
was another feature they shared with the philosopher, and one which could well have
contributed to Mauss’s approval of him.

7. Presenting an argument. Spinoza’s admiration for Euclid led to three of his books being
presented in ‘geometrical style’, by which he meant a division of the text into sentences or
paragraphs labelled as definitions, axioms, propositions, corollaries, etc. – the definitions
coming first.

The Durkheimians laid equal emphasis on definitions. Following Durkheim’s treatment of

them in Rules (Fr 128-9), Mauss’s encyclopaedia article begins its section on Method with a
subsection labelled Definition, which itself opens: ‘Like every science, sociology should
begin the study of each problem with a definition.’ Such initial definition will indicate and
delimit the field of research, but will be provisional. Thus in Sacrifice the initial definition is
replaced, after the analysis, by a more fundamental one (Allen 2013: 151, 153).

8. The world we live in. Descartes was a dualist. The world consisted of Extension –
everything that occupies space or moves in it, and Thought – what exists in minds. Spinoza

1 Note 9 in the translation.

2 For brevity I shall often omit the names of Mauss’s co-authors.

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found this position unsatisfying and argued for a more monist position. Extension and
Thought, or matter and mind, were both attributes of ultimate and Infinite Substance (I write
the word with capital S). Substance might have other attributes, but only these two were
accessible to humanity. Substance was not just one Aristotelian category alongside others. It
was identical with Nature, and Nature was identical with God; the phrase Deus sive Natura is
recurrent. An individual human being is a finite thinking mode within this infinite and eternal
Substance. God is not outside the nature that, according to Genesis, he created during the first
five days; and as for the mankind, which the myth has him create on the sixth day, that too is
within nature. The world we live in, both physical and mental, is equated with Deus sive
Natura.

For the members of the AS the aim of their new discipline was to take the approach and
methods that had brought such success in the older sciences, and extend them so that they
applied to the communal life of human beings. This amounts to including mankind within the
realm of what needs to be studied and understood, alongside the matter of the physicist and
chemist, and the life forms of the biologists. As the encyclopaedia article says in its third
paragraph, ‘all the metaphysical traditions that treat man as a being who stands apart, outside
nature, are obstacles to the progress of sociological thought’ (II 139). Far from being an
obstacle in this sense, Spinoza’s metaphysics is an encouragement. As Nielsen shows (1999:
48), Durkheim occasionally even refers to society using the phrase ‘social substance’. But for
the most part Durkheim in effect simply replaces Spinoza’s Substance with Society (which I
also sometimes write with capital S).

I leave God on one side for the moment, but a word is needed on Society. One may be
tempted to think of society as consisting of people, together with their relationships and ideas,
but that is too simple. In his first review -- of Schaeffler in 1885 -- Durkheim wrote that the
substance (matière) of which society consists comprises a double element: one passive, the
other active, persons and things’ (Nielsen 48); and Mauss too was well aware of the material
component of society. He mentioned his apprenticeship as having included museography,
that is, material culture (1996: 23), and argued in Magic that certain techniques such as
metallurgy cold only develop in the shelter afforded by magic. No less important to him was
the rubric of social morphology. His study of Eskimo seasonal variations (1906) alludes to
this rubric in its subtitle, and covers Eskimo dwellings as well as the distribution of their
bodies across their territory. Social facts included the material along with institutions and

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collective representations. My comparison is between Spinoza’s Substance with its two
attributes extension and thought, and Durkheimian Society with its objects and ideas.

9. Totality of knowledge. Spinoza has often been called a pantheist, and his concept of
Substance was intended to embrace everything then known (in an academic sense), and
everything that could ever be known. Is there anything comparably all-embracing in
Durkheimian thinking? The answer seems to me less simple than it appears.

If sociology is the science of society and societies, and if Society corresponds to Spinozan
Substance, can one say that sociology embraces everything? At first sight, absolutely not.
This ‘new’ discipline has its own specific subject matter, namely social facts, which are sui
generis and distinct from the subject matter of other disciplines. It is with this in mind that the
encyclopaedia article (173) separates sociology from, for instance, history with its impalpable
dust-cloud (poussière)3 of isolated facts. On the other hand, consider a finding from a
traditional hard science – say astronomy. It may start off as the intuition of an individual
researcher, but once it gains acceptance it becomes a collective representation within the
community of astronomers, and may even, after popularisation, find its way into the world-
view of society at large. In any case, like any discipline, astronomy is a social institution
(with its conferences, textbooks, qualifications, etc.).

From this point of view, the sociology of knowledge covers or infiltrates all disciplines, and
even knowledge that is still in the process of being assimilated. No doubt a distinction exists
between knowledge of a phenomenon, and second-order knowledge about that knowledge.
Nevertheless, there is a sense in which more or less everything has a social aspect and hence
can be embraced by sociology. There are sociologies of art, literature, music, fashion,
suicide, etc. As one of Mauss’s pupils put it when introducing the Manual (Paulme 1967: I),
Mauss always insisted that fieldworkers needed to possess ‘an insatiable curiosity, such as
called for a truly encyclopaedic cultural background’ (such as Mauss himself possessed). The
Durkheimians sometimes contributed directly to the sociology of knowledge – recall
Durkheim on the history of French education, Mauss with Hubert on the secretive side to
magic, Meillet (1910) on specialised professions and semantic history – but they did so in a
piecemeal way. No doubt academic prudence deterred them from trumpeting too loudly the
potentially pervasive scope of the discipline they were trying to put on the map. Much later

3 Translated ‘froth’ by Jeffrey (2005: 27).

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on, in 1924, Mauss envisaged sociology collaborating with psychology and history in writing
the history of human thought and ‘perhaps inspiring the best philosophy’ (SA 310).

Following up point 5 then, I am suggesting that Spinoza and Mauss shared a sense that what
they were doing bore on the totality of knowledge. Whether or not this particular argument
carries conviction, there is no doubt that Mauss often thought about totalities.

10. Other holistic formulations. Since the new science had to cover all facts or phenomena
that were ‘social’ according to their definitions, their flagship publication, the Année
sociologique, had to do likewise. But this raised the practical problem of how to organise all
these facts. The last couple of pages in the encyclopaedia article address just this issue.
Mauss recognises two great orders of facts: social morphology, covering groups, with their
demography and distribution, contrasts with institutions and representations. The second
order contains the special sociologies (of religion, law, technology, etc.), but also the less
obvious rubric ‘general sociology’, which concerns ‘what gives unity to all the social
phenomena’ (III 176, cf. 162, tr 29). Later Mauss came to prefer another label: general
phenomena were better called ‘total’ ones – whence the much-discussed phrase ‘total social
facts’ (see Allen 2000: 143, SA 329).

Mauss’s concern for holistic phenomena is manifest in his use of the word ‘total’ in two other
phrases: ‘the system of total prestations’ (21 III 35) is widely known from the Gift, and
l’homme total envisages humanity as simultaneously biological, psychological and
sociological. All three expressions date from the 1920s, but their roots go back twenty years
earlier, as the next section shows.

11. The categories, especially substance and totality. The idea that human thought is based
on certain fundamental categories goes back at least to Aristotle. Spinoza does not discuss
the categories as a set, but his central idea, namely Substance, is the first category in
Aristotle’s main lists, and Mauss long had in mind to produce (with Hubert) a two-or three-
volume study of Substance (Allen 1998). Moreover, he often refers explicitly to items from
the lists of categories in Aristotle and other philosophers (Allen 2000: 91ff). The idea of a
systematic sociological treatment of the categories is first adumbrated in the final paragraph
of Durkheim and Mauss’s Primitive Classification (1903), which in addition to classification
mentions time, space, cause, substance, and forms of reasoning. But the essay has also
covered the category of totality, which is implicit in the notion of classification. Primitive
classifications, they say, organise things into groups which are coordinated in such a way as

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to ‘form a single whole (un seul et même tout)’. Such classes ‘unify knowledge’, and
constitute ‘a first philosophy of nature’ (ibid 82, tr 81). If the totality of things is conceived as
a single system, this is because society itself is conceived in the same way. It is a whole, or
rather it is the unique whole to which everything is related. So logical hierarchy is only
another aspect of social hierarchy. (Their point here refers not to political hierarchy, such as
chiefdom or gerontocracy, but to the sense in which the whole outranks the parts, the genus
the species, or the tribe the clan.) ‘The unity of knowledge is nothing other than the unity of
the collectivity, extended to the universe’ (84 tr 83f). Durkheim and Mauss are (as usual)
putting the collectivity, meaning Society, where Spinoza puts Substance/God/ Nature. One
recalls from Elementary Forms the striking footnote ( ) suggesting that divinity, society
and totality are all aspects of the same concept.

12. Brahmā and brahman. Primitive Classification is also useful in drawing attention to
India. As far as I know, Spinoza never referred to Indian thought, whereas Mauss studied
Sanskrit intensively, starting in 1895, and found his first job in 1900 as a teacher of Indology;
India, especially its religions, was to mark his thinking throughout his life (Allen 2010,
2014). But the Spinoza-Mauss gap is not unbridgeable, as we shall see after assembling
some of Mauss’s observations on two closely inter-related Indian concepts.

After discussing China, Primitive Classification turns to the other ancient literate
civilisations, especially to their mythologies. Every mythology is fundamentally a
classification; well-organised pantheons share out the universe among their members. The
authors try next to conceptualise the processes leading from such pantheons to monotheism
and philosophical views of nature. In India (where the textual evidence covers a particularly
long historical time-span) the individuality of the gods tends to decline, leading to a degree of
unity and pantheism; local godlings are absorbed into the major gods, resulting in figures
such as Pan, Brahmā and Prajāpati. Standing at the top of the taxonomic hierarchy, such
absolute and pure beings are almost as poor in imagery as the transcendent God of the
Christians.

Early Mauss refers quite often to the god Brahmā, or his neuter form brahman – I have found
eight other references. Thus in Sacrifice, Chapter 5 discusses the relationship between victim
and god (I 299 tr 91f). Since sacrificial victims feed gods, sacrifice can end up appearing as
their essence, origin and creator, indeed as the creator of all things. Three such cosmogonic
beings are mentioned – Puruṣa in the famous Rigvedic hymn 10.90, Prajāpati (‘Lord of

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Beings’), who dominates the Brāhmaṇa texts somewhat later, and classical India’s Brahmā
(who as Creator is sometimes bracketed with Vishnu the Preserver and Śiva the Destroyer, to
form the Hindu ‘Trinity’). In this passage Mauss was drawing on the lectures of his teacher
Sylvain Lévi, and his review of Lévi’s book in 1900 uses similar wording (I 353). Sacrifice,
i.e. Prajāpati, is the god par excellence, the master, the undetermined god, the infinite, the
spirit whence comes everything, continually dying and being born. He is le tout (totality),
and the forerunner of the future Brahmā, just as his end is the prototype of the future
Buddhist annihilation (nirvāna).

Mauss’s fullest discussion is in his Magic (1904: 109f). Having discussed various aspects of
‘magic’, he turns to non-European words covering similar semantic territory, and in particular
to the Melanesian term mana. He recognises in its meaning three senses that are not sharply
distinguished. It is a quality – something with mana may be powerful or extraordinary. It is
a thing or substance such as can be seen or heard. And thirdly, it is a force, whether that of
an animate or inanimate being; indeed it is force par excellence, or potency. But this force is
spiritual -- different from ordinary mechanical forces and hedged round by taboos. Mana
operates in a special milieu, which constitutes a world apart; it is a like a pervasive ether (SA
103-5).

A comparable term is used by certain Iroquois in North America and by native Australians;
and many societies may have the same idea without lexicalising it. Others, like India, have
deconstructed or fragmented it. Thus Mauss proposes that brahman, ‘the fundamental notion
of Hindu pantheism’, is one of these fragments, and he summarises the history of this family
of words. At first brahman covers ritual formulae with their magico-religious power. Later
the ritual aspect yields to metaphysics, so that brahman becomes the active principle, distinct
and immanent, of the whole world. Everything apart from it is illusion. By accessing it the
yogin can become a magician. ‘It is the first principle of the universe, total, separated, living
yet inert. It is the quintessence’ (SA 109f).

To sum up, supreme deities such as Prajāpati and Brahmā represent a step towards
monotheism and connote creation, totality and the infinite; in addition, they continue one part
of the complex tribal notion of mana. But mana is, as it were, a fourth dimension of space,
and functions like a category, often an unconscious and taken-for-granted one (SA 111).
However, as he adds in Mélanges (1909: 29), it is not only a special category of primitive
thought (tending to decline in the modern west), but also the first form taken by other

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categories still operative in our thinking, namely substance and cause (later he will emphasise
the second). The notion of cause shades easily into those of force and potency.

Spinoza, as we said, ignores India, but his notion of substance brings together many of these
ideas – monotheism, creation, infinity, totality. Moreover his Substance/Nature/God is, he
maintains, unlike everything else, causa sui, the cause of itself (e.g. Hampshire 2005: 40).
This phrase opens the first Book of his Ethics, constituting the first definition: ‘By cause of
itself I understand that whose essence involves existence or that whose nature cannot be
conceived except as existing’ (Curley 1985: 408).

Mauss’s publications never connect Brahmā/brahman with Spinoza, but I suppose that, given
his projected but unwritten thesis on Spinoza, he was aware of the connection and would
have noted it the equally unwritten work on the category of Substance. The connection is in
fact sufficiently obvious to have struck a writer who is not in the least concerned with Mauss.

An ambitious book by Ben-Ami Scharfstein (1998) is called A comparative history of world

philosophy: from the Upanishads to Kant. Chapter 11, on ‘Immanent-transcendent holism’,
is subtitled ‘Shankara, Spinoza’. Shankara, dated roughly 700-750 AD, was an extremely
influential (though probably tendentious) commentator on earlier Sanskrit texts, especially on
the Brahma or Vedanta Sutra (itself based on the Upanishads). His position is usually
described as non-dualist (a-dvaita), so effectively monist. His main teaching is the absolute
identity of the individual self (ātman) and brahman, often expressed in the phrase tat tvam asi
‘that thou art, or that is you’.

Justifying his comparison, Scharfstein starts by noting that both thinkers share an interest in
‘the relation of the individual human being to reality as a whole’ – to what Shankara calls
Ātman or Brahman and what Spinoza calls Substance. In their different languages, both
recommend striving for liberation. For the Indian, one should realise one’s identity with the
limitless consciousness that is Brahman, thus achieving mokṣa. For Spinoza, one should
realise that one’s intellect is one finite mode of thinking, determined by others, all of them
being parts of the eternal infinite intellect of God. Clarified and strengthened by this
realisation, one should ‘act for one’s own advantage and be blessed in God’s infinite love for
himself.’ After summarising the views of the two thinkers and noting their differences,
Scharfstein ends with three paragraphs on their similarities, which I cannot quote here.

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My main point is that Mauss was interested in Brahmā/brahman as representing a key phase
in the world history of magico-religious thinking, and that the Indian ideas show a
remarkable similarity to those propounded by Spinoza. This must be part of the reason why
Mauss remained interested in the Dutch intellectual, even after the proposed thesis on him
was abandoned in 1898.

* * *

The twelve reasons I have offered are the substance of the paper, but perhaps I can end with a
quick reflexive note. Why did I choose the topic? In trying to follow up Primitive
Classification, I have long argued that the proto-Indo-Europeans possessed a hierarchical and
pentadic ideology, most neatly expressed in tables having five columns. The highest ranking
column, which I place on the left, is the one which, in one context after another, contains
Puruṣa, Prajāpati or Brahmā (not to mention the Zoroastrian Creator Ahura Mazdā). I
sometimes simplify the definition of the column as containing what is transcendent, but the
deeper definition refers to what is both Other, Outside or Beyond, and valued. Spinoza’s God
is the world, so is often described as immanent, as distinct from transcendent. But his very
use of the term God shows that this opposition can be surmounted. To what extent the
Judaeo-Christian concept of God is indebted to Iranian and Indo-Iranian tradition is of course
a vast question, but still, I think, an open one. In directing his boundless curiosity to both
Spinoza and Brahmā, Mauss raises a worthwhile question.

5019

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