Advaita and Western Philosophy — Points of Contact
Advaita Vedanta has profound connections with Western philosophical traditions — from Plotinus and Eckhart through Schopenhauer, Schelling, and Bradley to contemporary consciousness studies.
The resonances between Advaita Vedanta and Western philosophy are extensive: (1) Plotinus (Neoplatonism) — the One as the source of all multiplicity, return to the One through contemplation; (2) Meister Eckhart (Medieval Christian mysticism) — the Godhead beyond God as the formless absolute; the soul's identity with the divine ground; (3) Schopenhauer — explicitly drew on Vedanta and Buddhist thought; the Will as the underlying reality behind all phenomena; (4) Schelling's absolute identity philosophy — subject and object as appearances of a single absolute; (5) F.H. Bradley's Absolute Idealism — appearance and reality, the Absolute as a unified whole; (6) Contemporary philosophy of mind (Chalmers, Nagel, Searle) — the Hard Problem of consciousness and the irreducibility of subjective experience; (7) Process philosophy (Whitehead) — experience as the fundamental feature of reality. These convergences suggest that non-dual consciousness-philosophy is a recurring discovery across different intellectual traditions, each finding its own language for the same territory.
The identification of Atman with Brahman finds its nearest Western equivalent in the identification of the individual soul with the World-Soul in Plotinus.
Philosopher F.C. Copleston's 'History of Philosophy' notes that Plotinus's Enneads contain the most sophisticated Western approximation of the Advaita vision — the One (Hen) as the ineffable, undivided source from which all multiplicity emanates — suggesting that the non-dual recognition is a universal philosophical destination approached from many starting points.
Indian Philosophy