by Bradley: substance and quality cannot be related, since the relations of any
relation to its terms leads to an infinite regress. All concepts—being, cause,
relation, quality—lead to contradictions. Chitsukha embraced solipsism, since
the self is the only item not reduced to illusion. Later, in the 1500s, Prakasha-
nanda formulated Advaita as a Berkeleyesque subjectivism, in which objects
come into existence only when they are perceived.
The Advaita opponents responded by extending the heritage of disputes
over nominalism and realism. Shri Harsha’s anti-conceptualism rested on de-
struction of categories, that is, of universals; Madhva countered that every-
thing, even God, is particular. The basic feature of reality is the power of
everything to be itself, paralleling Duns Scotus’s haecceitas formulated in the
medieval Christian debate over universal and particular being. Madhva as-
serted that the universals of non-transient entities are themselves transient,
elevating particularism to the highest ontological level. Again this parallels the
position of Scotus and Ockham, that universals are only a filter through which
limited human consciousness sees the world; the perfect epistemological stand-
point, God, sees everything in its particularity.
Other Indian philosophers rang a series of changes on the tensions within
the concept of fundamental substance, here formulated as God or the world
ground. Ramanuja invoked the epistemological arguments that inner experi-
ence is self-validating, and that consciousness always intends an object, con-
cluding that consciousness always involves a real plurality. The one reality,
Brahman, includes plurality as the relation between substance and its attrib-
utes. Nimbarka responded that duality cannot be an attribute of non-duality
because attributes distinguish a substance from other substances, yet only one
substance exists. His solution is a version of Spinoza’s dual-aspect monism,
transposed from mental and material into a self-identical aspect and an ener-
gizing-potentiality aspect.
The apex of Indian philosophy around 1100–1300, including Shri Harsha,
Chitsukha, Ramanuja, Madhva, and Nimbarka, includes many points parallel
to European thought from Duns Scotus through Spinoza, Leibniz, Berkeley,
Hume, Kant, Idealists such as Bradley, even Bergson and Heidegger—a period
from about 1200 to 1900.^16 Obviously there is no strict parallel in the unfold-
ing of these arguments in chronological sequence. This is only to be expected,
since there are multiple social causes of ideas, and different combinations of
internal oppositions and external shocks occurred in India and Europe. Some
of the sequence of external causes were running in reverse: European intellec-
tual life was becoming more secularized, India more absorbed in sectarian
religion; hence the territory of Idealism, which is a halfway house between
universalistic and particularistic religious stances, was traversed in different
Sequence and Branch in the Social Production of Ideas^ •^825