Schopenhauer and the Upanishads

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I’m currently reading a few pages about Schopenhauer by Krishna Mani Pathak, from a chapter titled "The Quintessence of Upanishadic Wisdom and the Solace of Schopenhauer’s Life." It’s a lot to unpack.

It strikes me as unreasonable to claim that truth is this or that, as Schopenhauer and his admirers do, when no one can verify such assertions—access to transcendence being beyond this world, except in rare cases. In other words, his thesis on the Will, or Brahman, and absolute non-duality remains inaccessible. It’s like Berkeley’s tree falling unwitnessed in a forest: we can neither confirm nor deny it.

Before critiquing Schopenhauer’s view of ultimate Truth as One and abstract, as taught by the Upanishads, I’ll give credit where it’s due. His intellectual acuity and courage in embracing this teaching, presenting it as the pinnacle of knowledge, deserve respect. He never wavered in this passion, writing in his later years: "It is the most rewarding and elevating reading possible in the world; it has been the consolation of my life and will be that of my death." Yet, this admiration fuels my dispute.

Schopenhauer drew from the Upanishadic view that the physical world is an illusion (Maya) generating suffering, with reality’s true essence lying beyond sensory perception and dualism. So far, so good—except it’s wiser to call phenomena temporary rather than false or illusory. The problem emerges when he boldly asserts that Brahman is the sole reality, non-dual and eternal, unreachable by senses or science.

He suggested his intellectual capacities uncovered the profound knowledge of the Upanishads, Vedanta, and Buddhist metaphysics. Yet Srila Prabhupada’s “logic of half a hen”—a fool wanting eggs from a hen’s back half without feeding its front—captures his approach: he takes from these traditions without fully engaging them. Simply put, he saw the empirical world as illusion, its core a singular, eternal essence—Brahman or his Will—shaped by Kant’s idealism and Spinoza’s pantheism. Here, the world is a representation of the Will, and God is an idea, not a person. He doesn’t follow the Upanishads; he draws from them to nourish his speculation. Their essential teaching—to sit at a spiritual master’s feet and seek knowledge to free yourself from karma and samsara, reaching liberation—he skirts while aligning them with his system.

The contradiction? He deems Brahman beyond logic and empirical reach, yet leans on those tools to ponder and approach it. To him, Truth isn’t unreachable—it demands a different knowledge. Influenced by the Upanishads, he splits empirical understanding (senses and logic) from metaphysical insight (intuition and realization), arguing ultimate truth can’t be proven conventionally but can be felt through transformation. He accepts Brahman transcends mental categories and critiques rational grasps at it, yet instead of the Vedantic path of guru and practice, he stays in a philosophical stance some might call heretical.

Like Jainism and Buddhism, which veered from Upanishadic tradition to forge their own paths, Schopenhauer seeks an alternative. But while those systems built practical disciplines, his remains theoretical. He advocates intuition and aesthetic contemplation —will-less states akin to awakening— and ties Vedantic renunciation to his own rejection of the Will. Yet this stays conceptual, not a lived path like yoga, which he ignores. (He wasn’t even a strict vegetarian, occasionally eating meat —a small but telling lapse.)

He’s paradoxical: Brahman defies concepts, yet he rationalizes it philosophically. Vedanta demands living transmission and inner change for non-duality, not just intellect. Can one grasp the Upanishads’ wisdom without their discipline, like earning a diploma without training?

In my previous article, Terror, Words, and Cultures, I explored how language shapes our minds, cultures, and reliance on past thinkers’ concepts —right or wrong. I cited Popper and Paulhan, tracing this back to ancient Greece, where democracy was hailed as civilized and humane. We Westerners often claim we invented freedom, equality, science, and philosophy, sharing them through “pacification.” But in 2025, facing other civilizations’ rise and their own cultural assertions, we see truth isn’t monolithic. Reality is plural, shaping the worlds we inhabit: a lesson Schopenhauer’s speculative lens might obscure. ■