CHAPTER SIX E ASTERN PRINCIPLES WITHIN WESTERN METAPHYSICS : KRAUSE AND SCHOPENHAUER’ S R ECEPTION OF INDIAN PHILOSOPHY CLAUS DIERKSMEIER Introduction This paper addresses how elements of Indian philosophy resurface in the metaphysics of Karl Christian Friedrich Krause (1781-1832). After a brief prologue on Schopenhauer and Krause, I sketch how the latter incorporated some elements of Upanishadic and Vedantic speculation into his system. In particular, I emphasize Krause’s “panentheistic” conception of the absolute being (hereafter “the Absolute”) and how it facilitates an “open” dialectics that compares favourably with the dialectics of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. When one ponders the reception of Eastern thinking in Western metaphysics, Arthur Schopenhauer comes immediately to mind. He was introduced to Indian thought first in 1813 by the orientalist Friedrich Majer (1771-1818) in his mother’s salon in Weimar. 1 Schopenhauer’s appreciation for Vedantic texts then became deeper through the influence of one Karl Friedrich Christian Krause (1781-1832). Krause was a philosopher in his own right, although to his contemporaries he was known mostly as a master disciple of Fichte and Schelling. Between 1815 and 1817 Schopenhauer lived in Dresden in the Große Meißensche Gasse with Krause next door. Through Krause’s private library Schopenhauer 1 . Cf. Rüdiger Safranski, Schopenhauer und die wilden Jahre der Philosophie (Frankfurt: Fischer Tb., 1990), 303. See also Arthur Hübscher, The Philosophy of Schopenhauer in its intellectual context—Thinker against the tide (New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 1990).