Schrödinger’s firm rejection of dualism

Image: Dall-e. I created this image to reflect a view of dual aspect monism which says that mind and matter and two manifestations of a unified reality. Schrödinger, like philosopher Schopenhauer, rejected dualism, adopting a unitary idealism not consistent with dual aspect monism.

This is the third in a series called “Decoding Schrödinger’s Metaphysics.” Earlier we found he rejected Kant’s dismissal of transcendence and argued in favored of the monistic view of reality of Vedantism in which a unitary consciousness comprises all of reality with our sense of an objective external reality an illusion — called maya in Vedantism. Here we explore his arguments against Western-style mind-matter dualism.

Vedanta can be dualistic and monistic

For a philosophy as pervasive as Vedantism it is remarkable that there is a great divergence on the issue of dualism. Whether there is one thing — either mind or matter — or two things, mind and matter, matters a lot. It is a foundation aspect of metaphysics which Schrödinger says is not a component or element of knowledge, but the scaffolding on which all knowledge is built.

The Advaita school of Vedanta is monistic and this is the position that Schrödinger took in his book we are exploring titled My View of the World. Dvaita Vedantism teaches dualism as explained here:

“…reality is fundamentally composed of two parts. This mainly takes the form of either mind-matter dualism in Buddhist philosophy or awareness-’nature’ dualism in the Samkhya and Yoga schools of Hindu philosophy. These can be contrasted with mind-body…