A World with No Reality of Its Own

Hegel's application of the term acosmism to Spinoza is itself a piece of careful, somewhat mischievous philosophical reclassification: rather than accepting the common eighteenth century charge that Spinoza's system was atheistic, since it identified God with nature and denied a personal deity, Hegel argued the opposite diagnosis fit Spinoza's actual system far better, since if there truly is only one infinite substance and finite things are merely modes with no independent existence of their own, then what has really been denied is not God's reality but the world's, making Spinoza's system, on Hegel's careful reading, acosmism rather than atheism, a position that takes God's reality with maximal seriousness at the direct expense of the finite world's. Some later interpretations of Advaita Vedanta, particularly in modern reformist presentations associated with Swami Vivekananda, push the doctrine of maya in a comparably stark direction, describing the entire phenomenal world of separate persons and objects as having, from the standpoint of ultimate truth, no more genuine reality than a dream has upon waking, a reading more severe than classical Advaita's own more careful formulation of the world as neither simply real nor simply unreal, and one other scholars within the Advaita tradition itself have resisted as an overstatement of Shankara's actual position.