Nietzsche and the Bhagavad Gita: Ironic or Elective Affinities?

jijaji · August 5, 2001

Did Nietzsche know the text of the Bhagavad Gita? If he did, did he perhaps "elect" to borrow from it as he did from Emerson, Lange, Boscovitch, and others?1 Schopenhauer makes four references to the Gita in The Worlld as Will and Representation2, which Nietzsche read.3 But Nietzsche also read The System of the Vedanta written by his friend, Paul Deussen, which makes numerous references to the Gita.4 Perhaps Nietzsche did know the Gita through these two sources and, as a consequence, he misunderstood it and therefore criticized it severely. However, it can be demonsrtrated that Nietzsche's own philosophical position on a number of key issues is uncannily akin to the Gita - if only Nietzsche had understood it properly. This would make affinities between Nietzsche and the Gita ironic5 since, on the surface, they not only have nothing in common but also seem, from Nietzsche's perspective at least, to be diametrically opposed. The iron affinities between Nietzsche and the Gita will be addressed under three rubrics: metaphysics, psychology, and ethics.

Metaphysics: The usual interpretation on the Gita is Sankara's Advaita Vendanta or non-dualism. This is Deussen's reading of the Gita and Nietzsche seems to follow him wholesale. A more fruitfull interpretation is Ramanuja's Visistadvaita Vedanta or qualified non-dualism. Monism works in the Gita only if it is qualified. But the same has to be said for understanding Nietzsche's doctrine of will to power. While it pretends to be a monistic principle of explanation, it has to be qualified in order for it to explain anything at all. Nietzsche qualifies it using a host of simplistic bifurcations which are grounded primarily in ascending-descending.

Psychology: The most important distinction drawn in the Gita is between the body and the self (atman). By "body", however, the Gita includes everything "psychological" with the exception of pure consciousness. The "body-self" distinction is used not only to explain the constitution of the individual person (jiva), but analogously, the cosmos and its relationship to god (isvara) as the cosmic self, the cosmos being nothing more than the body of god. While the will to power is the most fundamental of Nietzsche's principles of explanation, the body (as a metaphor for life and nature) satisfies the same requirement albeit in a narrower field.

Ethics: The Gita develops three distinct pathways to liberation (moska): karma yoga (the way of action), jnana yoga (the way of knowledge), and bhakti yoga (the way of devotion). The first two collapse into a single yoga since they ultimately represent an illegitimate division between theory and practice. The pathof devotion is nothing more than a demand for a radical change of attitude towards existence so that existence, in its entirety, is affirmed. Bhakti yoga therefore serves the very same function in the Gita that amor fati, and by extension, the eternal return of the same, does for Nietzsche. Both are simply means for redeeming or delivering human beings via an attitude of complete acceptance.

Dr. Richard Brown

Brock University

1 Stack uses "elect" in this fashion. See George J. Stack, Nietzsche and Emerson: An Elective Affinity (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1992) as well as LAnge and Nietzsche (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1983).

2 Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, translated by E. F. J. Payne (New York: Dover, 1958), Vol I, pp. 284, 388 and Vol II., pp. 326 and 473.

3 Mervyn Sprung has shown that in Nietzsche's own copy of Schopenhauer's text, Nietzsche underlined only three passages which dealt specifically with eastern thought and only to one of them made reference to the Gita: "Death is appearance". See Mervyn Sprung, "Nietzsche Trans-European Eye", Nietzsche and Asian Thought, edited by Graham Parkes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), p.82.

4 Paul Deussen, The System of Vedanta (New York: Dover, 1973).

5 This is the position taken by Morrison vis-a-vis Nietzsche and early Buddhism. See Robert G. Morrison, Nietzsche and Buddhism: A Study in Nihilism and Ironic Affinities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997)

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