Abstract
Nietzsche represents in an interesting way the well-worn Western approach to Asian philosophical and religious thinking: initial excitement, then neglect by appropriation, and swift rejection when found to be incompatible with one’s own tradition, whose roots are inexorably traced back to the ‘ancient’ Greeks. Yet, Nietzsche’s philosophical critique and methods - such as ‘perspectivism’ - offer an instructive route through which to better understand another tradition even if the sole purpose of this exercise is to perceive one’s own limitations through the eyes of the other: a self-destruktion of sorts. To help correct this shortcoming and begin the long overdue task of even-handed dialogue - or contemporary comparative philosophy - we will be served well by looking at Nietzsche’s mistakes, which in turn informed the tragic critic of the West of the last century, Martin Heidegger. We may learn here not to cast others in one’s own troubled image; and not to reverse cultural icons: Europe’s Superman, and Asia’s Buddha.
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Notes
Parkes (1991) p. 5: ‘Essays on Nietzsche began to appear in periodicals in Japan while he was still alive, during the last decade of the 19th century. Raphael von Koeber, who taught philosophy at the Imperial University of Tokyo, began to talk about Nietzsche in his lectures there during the mid-1890s, and in 1897 the head of the philosophy department there, Inoue Tetsujiro, bought an edition of Nietzsche’s complete works in Germany and, on his return to Japan, introduced some of the German philosopher’s ideas to his students.’ Furthermore. ‘In 1898, an article appeared in one of the leading literary journals which presented Nietzsche’s ideas as a challenge to stimulate Japanese Buddhism to engage in philosophical reflection on its foundation.’ p. 5. See also Chap. 11 in Parkes ibid: Graham Parkes ‘The Early Reception of Nietzsche’s Philosophy in Japan,’ pp. 177–199.
As Parkes, ibid, p. 5, notes, some parts of this terrain specifically resisted the reception of Nietzsche’s thought, e.g., his works were banned in Russia from the time of the publication of The Birth of Tragedy.
See Mehta (1987). Heidegger dismissed Indian philosophy from his main concerns on the basis that it did not provide a radical departure from Western thinking but was in fact part of the same exploration of Being carried to its fulfilment in Greek thought. He thus looked further east to China (and especially Japan) for a way of thinking founded on completely different grounds.
J. L. Mehta The Philosophy of Heidegger (Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, 1967 [a rare copy I personally rescued from the BHU’s derelict storeroom in 1991], Harper Torchbooks, New York, 1971). Issued as Martin Heidegger: The Way and the Vision, University Press of Hawaii, Honolulu, 1976.
J.L. Mehta in Parkes (1987) op cit., pp. 24–27, p. 8 passim; see also, Jackson (1992), pp. 3–7, p. 184.
See French version of this essay in M. Hulin (1979)
Sedlar op cit. pp. 42–45
Ibid pp. 45–49
See The Birth of Tragedy, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, ed. Walter Kaufmann (Modern Library, N Y, 1968, pp. 93–95). Jung was later to voice very similar concerns in view of the 20th-century interest in Eastern religions and a subsequent loss in belief in Western intellectual achievement.
See Bilimoria (2001).
Figl 1991 p. 52: ‘Again, in the context of the question of fate Nietzsche comes to speak of two basic documents on Indian literature and religion, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. These two epics are mentioned in a draft Nietzsche made of an essay for school dated December 8, 1862 (BAW 2, 445 Nachbericht)’. Figl’s essay deals primarily with this early period of Nietzsche’s encounters with Asian thought—his ‘high school’ years at Pforta (1854–64) as well as his years at the University of Bonn (1864–65).
See note 1 above.
This discussion, with a concern for delineating parallels between Nietzschean thinking and later Buddhism, becomes the main focus of the Parkes anthology Nietzsche and Asian Thought
Mistry (1981).
Max Ladner Nietzsche und der Buddhismus (Zurich, 1933). Mistry’s introduction is concerned primarily with a critical assessment of this earlier monograph on Nietzsche and Buddhism by Ladner.
Morrison (1997). See Chapters 2 and 7 in particular.
Ibid, p 27, n109, citing Nietzsche from The Gay Science 134.
Paul Deussen Die Elemente der Metaphysik (Aachen, 1877) and Das System des Vedānta (Leipzig, 1883). See Mistry p.16.
Archivists have found to their dismay that volumes of bound works on Indian thought and literature (some sent by Deussen) remained unopened on Nietzsche’s dusty bookshelves, reinforcing the suspicion, in some circles, that Nietzsche fabricated many of his references to Hindu and Buddhist ideas simply by looking at the cover of the texts sent to him; the cryptic use of the name of ‘Zarathustra’ may well have had its origins through such a casual encounter, or ‘one-night book stand’. See Mistry’s bibliography for a selection of titles of interest found on Nietzsche’s own bookshelves.
Herman Oldenberg Buddha. Sein Leben, seine Lehre, seine Gemeinde (Berlin, 1881) See Mistry p. 16
Mistry op. cit. p. 10
Eberhard Scheiffele ‘Questioning One’s “Own” from the Perspective of the Foreign’, translated by Graham Parkes pp. 31–47 in Parkes op.cit. p. 32, italics omitted from original.
Solomon (1988) p. 9
Mistry op. cit. p. 5 n. 7 with reference to Aphorism 27 in Nietzsche’s The Genealogy of Morals
A.C. Danto ‘Some Remarks on The Genealogy of Morals’ pp. 13–28 in Solomon and Higgins (1998) p. 23. Danto’s comments provide a useful insight into the meaning behind Nietzsche’s idea of ressentiment: ‘For what ressentiment, which is only distantly connected to the English word resentment, amounts to is a certain sort of interpretative explanation of suffering in the mind of the sufferer…Sufferers tend to moralize suffering by holding someone or something responsible for it: as though mere suffering, undeserved only in the sense that it makes no sense to speak of it as deserved, is simply unintelligible.’ pp. 22–23
op cit, pp. 97–99. Nietzsche’s citations are from Ecco Homo, and the source of which is probably Oldenberg.
Eberhard Scheiffele op. cit. p. 42
Mistry p.7, includes reference to Will to Power p. 580
Ibid p. 7
Mistry ibid p. 7, the Full text that Mistry is citing from is in Twilight of the Idols The Anti-Christ, p. 129: ‘With my condemnation of Christianity, I should not like to have wronged a kindred religion which even preponderates in the number of its believers: Buddhism. They belong together as nihilistic religions – they are decadence religions – but they are distinguished from one another in the most remarkable way. The critic of Christianity is profoundly grateful to Indian scholars that one is now able to compare´ these two religions. – Buddhism is a hundred times more realistic that Christianity – it has a heritage of a cool and objective profoundly from Christianity – the self-deception of moral concepts behind it – it stands, in any language, beyond good and evil. – The two physiological facts upon which it rests and on which it fixes its eyes are: firstly an excessive excitability of sensibility which expresses itself as a refined capacity for pain, then an over-intellectuality, a too great preoccupation with concepts and logical procedures under which the personal instinct has sustained harm to the advantage of the “impersonal” … On the basis of these physiological condition a state of depression has arisen: against these depression Buddhism takes hygienic measures.’ He goes on to list seemingly approbatingly a quasi-stoical practices and mechanism of self-control towards the emergence of a healthy person, individual, egoismI, and ends this reportage with this remarkable judgment: ‘In the teachings of Buddha egoism becomes a duty: the “one thing needful”, the “how you can get rid of suffering” regulates and circumscribes the entire spiritual diet’ – much like Socrates elevation of personal egoism to morality. p 130. posing of problems in its composition, it arrives after a philosophical movement lasting hundreds of years; the concept ‘God’ is already abolished by the time it arrives. Buddhism is the only positivistic religion history has to show us, even in its epistemology (a strict phenomenalism -), it no longer speaks of “the struggle against sin’ but, quite in accordance with actuality, “the struggle against suffering’. It already has – and this distinguishes it includes reference to Will to Power p. 580
Nietzsche The Antichrist p. 20 quoted in M. Hulin ‘Nietzsche and the Suffering of the Indian Ascetic’ pp. 64–75 in Parkes (1991) op cit p. 71
Ronald A. Carson ‘Nietzsche’s Jesus’ pp. 39–52 in Cross Currents Winter 1971. p. 39
Ibid p. 40, Nietzsche II, 1191. All quotations from Nietzsche are from Friedrich Nietzsche: Werke in drei Bänden, ed. Karl Schlechtha (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1954–56), vols. II-III
Ibid. p. 40, Nietzsche II, 1192–93
Ibid. pp. 40–41, Nietzsche II, 1192–93
Ibid. p. 41, Nietzsche II, 1198
Ibid. p. 49, Nietzsche II, 1200
Ibid. p. 49, Nietzsche II, 643
Ibid. p. 46, Nietzsche III, 588
Ibid. p. 49, Nietzsche III, 641
Ibid. p. 49. Nietzsche II, 1191; What Nietzsche says about Manu is instructive here. This is an instance of Nietzsche trying his hands at crude historical anthropology to reinforce his speculative views on hierarchical divisions, in the context of the Master/Slave narrative that made virtues out of qualities that were in his eyes largely negative values, namely, meekness, humility, self-denial, modesty, pity and compassion. In the Nachlass, a whole chapter is devoted to Manu (‘On the criticism of the Law Book of Manu’. See also Joan Stambaugh Untersuchungen zum Problem der Zeit bei Nietzsche (Den Haag, 1959) p. 180), and in Twilight of the Idols he discusses Manu in the context of the idea of a master race which the Indians foresaw far better even than Christian patriarchs with their roots in Jewish religion. His praise for Manu is unqualified; never again do we see unreserved approbation for any Indian or Asian ideas in Nietzsche. Christianity is characterized as the triumph of the Chandala, or slave values, the undying Chandala revenge as the religion of love, whereas The Laws of Manu are to him ‘an incomparably spiritual and superior work’ because Manu, he thought, arrested once and for all the possibility of a slave rebellion. ‘Nietzsche seized on it as a happy and unexpected confirmation of an aspect of his own thinking. It was the radical hierarchy of human worth that aroused his enthusiasm; one has to admire Nietzsche’s sensitive “nose” when he says, “Plato reads like one who had been well instructed by a Brahmin.”’ (Mistry op. cit.) p. 13, n. 13). Nietzsche did not realize that Manu probably had as much impact on the historical organization of the Indian society as Plato has had on the West. Manu’s prescriptivism has been often challenged and checked by any number of social thinkers, activists, reformists, from the intoxicated Bhakta, or devotional bards, to Gandhi nearer our time. The very values that Nietzsche ascribes to the slaves (in the inversion of their envy) are also the values that are central to Brahmanical priests. It is odd of him to think that all hierarchies everywhere share the same basic Master values—his own perspectivism should have alerted him to the relativity of this ethical truth at least.
See Higgins, op. cit.
This phrase comes from Nietzsche’s Nachgelassene Fragmente, Juli 1882 bis Winter 1883–1884, written from November 1882 to February 1883.
op. cit. p. 43
At least one author has explored the Indian connection in respect of Nietzsche’s conception of eternal recurrence: D. Bannerjee ‘The Indian origin of Nietzsche’s theory of Eternal Return’ German Life and Letters VII (April, 1954) pp. 161–169 mentioned in Mistry p. 146, n. 14 Bannerjee (p. 163) argues that Nietzsche ‘fully accepted the doctrine of reincarnation and the theory of the Kalpas (the periodic appearance and reincarnation of worlds) deriving from Hinduism and propounded by Schopenhauer in his book, The World as Will and Imagination.’ (Mistry, op cit, p. 146, n. 14)
Kathleen Higgins ‘Reading Zarathustra’ pp. 132–151 in Solomon and Higgins op. cit. p. 144
Stambaugh (1972) p. 18
The frustration which Nietzsche felt with the ostensible passivity and ‘nihilism’ of Buddhism is well brought out in Chap. IV ‘On suffering’ of Mistry’s book where Nietzsche’s insistence of the existential need of suffering and the creative outcome of the experience of misfortune is highlighted. See pp. 116–123.
Kathleen Higgins ‘Reading Zarathustra’ pp. 132–151 in Solomon and Higgins, op. cit p.145
Mistry op. cit. p. 184
ibid. p. 184
ibid. p. 184
ibid. p. 185 (GM III, 10; D, 12, 113; HA II, 3)
ibid. p. 185 with reference to D, 113.
See, Singh (2007), p. 92.
Scheiffele’s analysis of the role of hinterfragen, ‘questioning behind’, for Nietzsche’s hermeneutics indicates reasons why this would be so: ‘The “logic” of Nietzsche’s imagery makes it clear why his primary interest does not lie with the foreign itself, in which he adopts a standpoint: his purpose is to look back at his own situation from the perspective of the foreign.’ (Scheiffle p. 44 in Parkes Nietzsche and Asian Thought).
Heidegger, Schelling (Niemeyer, Tubingen, 1971), p. 175 (emphasis added). Heidegger is picking up on Hegel’s argument: “The history of the world has an East kat’exochen… The history of the world travels from the East to West, for Europe, is absolutely the end of history, Asia the beginning”. The Philosophy of History (Dover, New York, 1956), p. 103. See Mehta in Jackson (1992), p. 257. See authors paper presented at Asian and Comparative Philosophy Society Conference, Melbourne, July 2008, “Being after Heidegger: A Mehta-Mīmāṃsā rejoinder’ (abstract on www.philosophy.unimelb.edu.au/asacp, click conferences).
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Acknowledgment
A much earlier version of the working paper was first presented at the Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy/Australasian Association of Philosophy Annual Conference, University of Adelaide. I wish to acknowledge my profound gratitude to Guy Petterson, Marty H. Heitz, and Jay Garfield for their significant contribution toward the subsequent development of this paper for publication.
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Bilimoria, P. Nietzsche as ‘Europe’s Buddha’ and ‘Asia’s Superman’. SOPHIA 47, 359–376 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-008-0079-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-008-0079-y