Nietzsche, Aurobindo, and a Cross-Cultural Response to Modernity (DRAFT)
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Hampshire College
NIETZSCHE, AUROBINDO, AND A CROSSCULTURAL RESPONSE TO MODERNITY
By Emily Lawson
A Division III Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Bachelor of Arts at Hampshire College
Committee: Alan Hodder, Chair (MayDecember) Heather Madden, Chair (January – December) Jay L. Garfield, Member (May – December) and Christoph Cox, Chair (JanuaryMay) Nalini Bhushan, Member (JanuaryMay)
AMHERST, MA DECEMBER 2015
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3 Table of Contents Acknowledgements ……………………………………………………….… 5 Abstract …………………………………………………………………....... 7 Transliteration, Pronunciation, and Specialized Citations…..…...……….…. 8 Introduction ……………………………………………………………….... 11 Chapter 1: Relevant Contexts …………………………………………….…17 Global Impacts of Modernity …………………………………….....17 Romanticism ……………………………………………..…19 Orientalism ……………………………………………..…...22 Darwinism ……………………………………………..……24 Nietzsche and the German Oriental Renaissance ………………..….29 Aurobindo and the Indian Renaissance ……………………….…….44 Chapter 2: Nietzsche’s Will to Power ………………………………………61 Situating the Will to Power …………………………………………62 Metaphysical Affirmation …………………………………………..66 Ethical Affirmation …………………………………………………75 Chapter 3: Aurobindo’s līlā ………………………………………….…......96 Situating līlā ………………………………………………….….….97 Metaphysical Affirmation …………………………………….…...106 Ethical Affirmation …………………………………………….….114
Chapter 4: CrossCultural Echoes ………………………………….……...126 Metaphysical Affirmation …………………………………………127 Ethical Affirmation ………………………………………………..134 The Meaning of Life: Will to Power and līlā ……………………...142 Bibliography ……………………………………………………………….147
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5 Acknowledgements I have been blessed with many conscientious mentors and kind friends to support me as I researched, drafted, and revised this paper. I am particularly grateful to the following individuals: Nalini Bhushan, for being an excellent teacher, advisor, supervisor, and mentor, for introducing me both to Indian philosophy and to Nietzsche, and for taking me on as a research assistant for Minds Without Fear: Philosophy in the Indian Renaissance. Thanks also for ferrying a book for me all the way from Peter Heehs’ library in Pondicherry. Christoph Cox, for sharing your expertise on Nietzsche and Schopenhauer as an advisor both before and after you officially served on my committee. Thanks for getting me thinking about German Idealism; for solid advice and kind words. Alan Hodder, for letting me sneak into your American Transcendentalism class as a freshman (where I first became curious about Indian philosophy) and being my advisor since I first came to Hampshire. Thanks also for teaching me in Myth and Myth Theory, The English Bible, and History and Philosophy of Yoga. You’ve been a supportive, astute, diligent advisor and a grounding presence. I’ll miss you very much. Jay Garfield, for being a fierce and loyal advisor. You helped me choose this topic while we walked around Sarnath drinking chai. You hired me and let me set up shop in your office. Engaged me intellectually. Had me over for dinner. Gave lightningfast, meticulous responses to countless iterations of this paper. I can’t thank you enough. Heather Madden, for scrupulous reading and rereading of this paper, for your careful attention to style and lyric, for singlehandedly supervising my other Div III in poetry. You’ve been a great friend and mentor for three years. Thanks for introducing me to three of my most cherished books. Connie Kassor, for bringing me to India, and for being an unofficial advisor throughout my Div III. You’ve been a source of strength and calm. My parents for your love emotional support. Thank you for making me who I am, for sending me to Hampshire, for encouraging me on– I owe you the world. Shane MacIntosh, who fed me, reassured me, offered perspective, and kindly closed my computer for me when I was working too late so I could get some sleep. Living with you has made Div III such a happy period of my life. Brave Folk: my beloved friends who have been with me since the beginning, when we started writing poetry together—thank you all for maintaining an intellectual community with me for four years. Thanks especially to Jake Ehrlich, who led the way on a comparative paper, and to Lukas Vrbka, who out of everyone has engaged the most with my thinking about this project and it’s place in my intellectual life. Love and thanks to Porter, Justine, Maddy, Emmy, Omnia, Brian, Asher, Hank, and so many others.
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7 Abstract Friedrich Nietzsche (18441900) and Aurobindo Ghose (18721950) formulated their theories of the Will to Power and līlā, respectively, in the context of a distinctly modern crosscultural conversation about the nature and value of existence. Each philosopher responds to global trends in modern intellectual history, particularly metaphysical idealism, Romanticism, Orientalism, and Darwinism. Nietzsche and Aurobindo were well versed in one another’s traditions: the milieu of the German Oriental Renaissance influenced Nietzsche, while Aurobindo engaged with the Indian Renaissance a century later. The ideologies of these movements are connected. Both thinkers react to prominent movements of idealism and pessimism by formulating “lifeaffirming” philosophies. Nietzsche deploys the Will to Power as a unifying theory that affirms the phenomenal world metaphysically by justifying realism, and affirms life ethically by justifying revaluation and selfovercoming. Aurobindo deploys līlā as a unifying theory that affirms the phenomenal world metaphysically and ethically in similar ways. Taken in context, their parallel arguments reflect not a coincidence, but a shared response to a modern intellectual predicament.
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Notes on Transliteration and Pronunciation In this paper, I use Latin transliteration of Sanskrit words. Because Sanskrit does not use capital or lowercase letters, Sanskrit words in this text are in lowercase unless referring to the name of a school, an Anglicized word, or a text. “Brahman” is an exception. I use the standard Romanization scheme given by the National Library at Kolkata for transliterating Indic languages, as represented here: अ आ इ ई उ ऊ ऋ ಎ ए ऐ ಒ ओऔ अ अ ◌ं ◌ः a ā i ī u ū ṛ e ē a o ō a a a i u ṃ ḥ क ख ग घ ङ च छ ज झ ञ k k g g ṅ c c j j ñ a h a h a a h a h a a a a a ट ठ ड ढ ण त थ द ध न ṭ ṭ ḍ ḍ ṇ t t d d n a h a h a a h a h a a a a a प फ ब भ म য ழ ಳ റ ன p p b b m ẏ ḻ ḷ ṟ ṉ a h a h a a a a a a a a य र ಱल व श ष स ह ೞ y r ṟ l v ś ṣ s h l a a a a a a a a l
9 The following rules will allow an English speaker to correctly pronounce Sanskrit words. Generally, the accent falls on the last syllable, if the last syllable contains a long vowel or diphthong (a, I, u, e, o ai, au). Otherwise, the third syllable from the end is generally accented. Radhakrishnan and Moore provide the following pronunciation guide: a – like u in but ā – like a in father i – like i in pain ī – like i in police u – like u in pull ū – like u in rude ṛ like Ri in Rita e – like e in prey ai – like ai in aisle o – like o in go au – like ou in house k – like k in kind kh – like kh in inkhorn g – like g in to gh – like gh in loghut ṅ or ñ – like n in sing c – like ch in check j – like j in jump jh – like dgeh in hedgehog ñ – like n in singe ṭ like t in time ṭh – like th in boathouse ṁ, ṃ, or ṅ seminasal sound ḍ like d in drum ḍh – like dh in madhouse ṇ like n in nice t – like t in water th – like th in nuthook d – like d in dice dh – like dh in adhere n – like n in not p like p in put ph – like ph in uphill b – like b in bear bh – like bh in abhor m – like m in mad y – like y in yes
10 r – like r in red l – like l in lull v – like v in very (like w after consonant) ś – like sh in shut ṣ like sh in shut but with the tip of the tongue turned backward s – like s in since h – like h in him ḥ final h aspirate sound1
1 Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan and Charles A. Moore, A Sourcebook in Indian Philosophy
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957), 638–639.
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Works by Friedrich Nietzsche are cited in this paper using the citation style suggested by The Journal of Nietzsche Studies. Titles are abbreviated as follows: ● ● ● ● ●
● ● ● ● ● ● ●
● ●
A = The Antichrist BGE = Beyond Good and Evil BT = The Birth of Tragedy D = Daybreak/Dawn EH = Ecce Homo (sections abbreviated “Wise,” “Clever,” “Books,” “Destiny”; abbreviations for titles discussed in “Books” are indicated instead of “Books” where relevant) GM = On the Genealogy of Morality/Morals GS = The Gay Science NCW = Nietzsche Contra Wagner PPP = PrePlatonic Philosophers PTAG = Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks SE = “Schopenhauer as Educator” TI = Twilight of the Idols (sections abbreviated “Maxims,” “Socrates,” “Reason,” “World,” “Morality,” “Errors,” “Improvers,” “Germans,” “Skirmishes,” “Ancients,” “Hammer”) WP = The Will to Power Z = Thus Spoke Zarathustra (references to Z list the part number and chapter title followed by the relevant section number when applicable: Z:III “On Old and New Tablets” 1)
12 Introduction The connection between Aurobindo Ghose (18721950) and Friedrich Nietzsche (18441900) has received little attention in academic philosophy.2 This is a surprising oversight, though there are reasons to overlook their affinity: for one thing, Nietzsche and Aurobindo write from different cultural contexts and intellectual traditions. Aurobindo is a metaphysician, and Nietzsche a selfproclaimed antimetaphysician. Aurobindo is a religious guru, and the archatheist Nietzsche was an avowed enemy of priests, ascetics, and Brahmins. Nonetheless, Aurobindo and Nietzsche were each iconoclasts who catalyzed radical, lasting shifts in their respective traditions. More importantly, their juxtaposition illusminates significant overlaps in the ideological matrices between German and Indian struggles with philosophical idealism. Few scholars have published work on Nietzsche and Aurobindo, and these works tend to focus on each philosopher’s rendering of the “superman,” perhaps because this parallel first intrigued Aurobindo.3 This comparison only goes so deep, however, and a parallel in language does not necessarily reveal a parallel in project. Most commentators have
2 Aurobindo’s devotees often refer to him as Śrī Aurobindo. Because I write about him as a
scholar, rather than as a devotee, I will refer to him as “Aurobindo” from this point on. 3 Wilifred Huchzermeyer and HansJoachim Koch, Der Übermensch Bei Friedrich Nietzsche Und Sri Aurobindo (Gladenbach: Hinder + Deelmann, 1986); Paul Mirabile, “Nietzsche and Aurobindo ‘Le Ressentiment,’” NietzscheStudien 30, no. 1 (2001): 351–63; Aurobindo, Essays Divine and Human: Writings from Manuscripts 19101950, 1st ed., The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo 12 (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1997).;
13 overlooked more fundamental affinities in metaphysics and ethics.4 Most have also ignored context. The more I researched, however, the clearer it became that the similarities between their projects are not coincidental—rather, the intellectual problems they face arise from various conditions of Modernity. Exploring context reveals that the iconoclastic moves Nietzsche and Aurobindo make, though radical, evolved almost inevitably from the trajectory of intellectual history. Their reconstructions follow from an emerging intercontinental philosophical conversation about idealism and the value of life, which, as we will see, played out in both Germany and India. My own argument is both analytical and historical. I analyze major texts by each thinker to compare Nietzsche’s theory of the Will to Power and Aurobindo’s theory of līlā. I show that each unifying theory allows its creator to give meaning to human life both through metaphysical lifeaffirmation and ethical lifeaffirmation. Metaphysically, Nietzsche and Aurobindo each take a realist stance, affirming existence as a process of constant becoming that constantly evolves towards higher states. Ethically, each argues that individuals and societies should affirm life by deconstructing morality and engaging in a process of constant selfovercoming. These parallels in argument are intriguing, but they are only made meaningful in the light of their context. I suggest that these similarities do not arise by pure chance. Instead, they bespeak a set of larger patterns in Modern global philosophy. They are
4 There are some exceptions. Most notable is Ranajit Sarkar (2002) who wrote a booklength
monograph on morality in Nietzsche and Aurobindo. (Many thanks to Peter Heehs for lending me a copy from his private collection, and to Nalini Bhushan for ferrying the book from Puducherry to Northampton.) Richard Hartz (2013) mentions—but does not explore—a similarity between Nietzsche and Aurobindo in their lifeaffirmation and attitudes on the aesthetics of tragedy. Peter Heehs (2008) also notes in one sentence Aurobindo’s “almost Nietzschean” view of morality.
14 actually motivated by specific events in Indian and European history. Aurobindo and Nietzsche are best seen together as contributors to a larger, crosscultural conversation. Approaching this exercise, I worry about several unfortunate trends in comparative philosophy. Too often, wellintentioned White scholars try to legitimize the works of nonWestern thinkers by highlighting similarities to Western works. I have often found an implied argument in comparative papers that readers (presumably other, less openminded Western scholars) should pay attention to idealism in the Vedānta school, for example, because it parallels German Idealism. Despite attempting to challenge the Eurocentrism of academic philosophy, this argument is ultimately condescending. It upholds the standard that “real” philosophy is White philosophy. Instead of subverting colonial academic frameworks, this method leaves them intact. Here, I am uninterested in proving that Aurobindo and Nietzsche should be considered philosophers. Though I (perhaps problematically) focus on metaphysics and ethics in this paper, I do not mean to sanitize Aurobindo’s thought by denying the relevance of its spiritualism. Likewise, I am untroubled by Nietzsche’s more bizarre convictions.5 It is enough that both of these thinkers are addressing problems related to the nature of existence and the meaning of human life within it. Comparative philosophy also tends to treat philosophical systems from different cultures as completely isolated, instead of considering each thinker as an equally authoritative voice addressing shared concerns. I believe Aurobindo and Nietzsche are best compared in the latter light.
5 Nietzsche’s cosmologically implausible doctrine of the eternal return, which he received in
a state of ecstasy and apparently believed in emphatically, comes to mind.
15 In part, this paper is an exercise in what it might mean to take the deEurocentrization of philosophy seriously. This demands several measures. For one, it demands a change in the way many of us think about ideas. It will not do to assume that philosophy takes place in a detached realm of pure intellect. Instead, ideas should be understood as phenomena existing in the conventional world of human beings and our cultures. Ideas interact with human life. As ideas shape culture, of course, culture shapes our ideas: philosophy is best understood as a cultural production. This is my first premise. For this reason, it will not do, either, to think of ideas as growing and playing out only within the confines of a distinct geographical niche. Philosophical ideas have always been mobile and diffusely germinated. This is particularly true in the modern era. My investigation considers Nietzsche and Aurobindo’s contributions to philosophy as distinct voices in a transnational conversation, and considers their respective traditions as regional inflections in the flux of global philosophical history. This is particularly appropriate because this study focuses on two philosophers living in the wake of colonialism and the radically expanded intercultural exchange that accompanied and followed it. In this framework, it makes no sense to imagine a “center” or a “periphery” of the vast map of philosophical traditions. In this framework, it makes no sense to think of Western philosophy as the default, or to attempt to convince others to consider on nonWestern traditions by making comparisons to that default. My first chapter delivers relevant historical contexts for the textual analysis. It opens by gesturing towards larger trends in modernity, focusing on several in particular: the popularity of philosophical Idealism, an international tendency to reach for “renaissance tropes,”
16 European Orientalism, and the explosion of Darwinian theory onto the global scene. I show that Nietzsche and Aurobindo were both motivated by each trend. I then look at two geographically distinct but related phenomena—the “German Oriental Renaissance” and the “Indian Renaissance”—to show that intercultural philosophical discourse was shaping the intellectual milieus of both Germany and India. I begin with the German Oriental Renaissance, emphasizing how German Idealism was influenced by Vedānta philosophy. I show that the fantasy of India and its thought was diffused in the air of Nietzsche’s intellectual world, and that all of his major influences were themselves steeped in Indian thought. I then study more closely what Nietzsche read about Indian philosophy and how he assessed it. When framing Aurobindo’s philosophy in the Indian Renaissance, I focus on how Indian philosophy responded to European thought during his lifetime: how those ideas were being digested and reconstructed to make new, “Indianised” philosophy.6 I ultimately situate Aurobindo’s project as a crosscultural philosophical enterprise that also works as a “swaraj in ideas.” I then appraise his reading of Western philosophy, focusing on his reading and assessment of Nietzsche. In the next two chapters, I treat the philosophical systems of Nietzsche and Aurobindo, respectively, revealing their affinities through juxtaposition. In each case, I begin with a discussion of the “Will to Power” or “līlā” respectively. These themes are the ultimate focus of comparison: the unifying theories at the heart of each metaphysical and ethical system.
6 Aurobindo, The Renaissance in India, with A Defense of Indian Culture, The Complete
Works of Sri Aurobindo 20 (Pondicherry, India: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust, 1997), 440.
17 Nietzsche’s theory of the Will to Power and Aurobindo’s theory of līlā require context, because each theory is a reconstruction of a predecessor’s idea. The Will to Power is a revision of Schopenhauer’s Will to Life; līlā is a revision of Śaṅkarācārya’s māyā. Though indebted to their progenitors, Nietzsche and Aurobindo use them as a springboard into a new, more “realist” version of old ideas. Each analytic chapter addresses both metaphysics and ethics. I argue broadly that līlā and the Will to Power function to justify metaphysics ethically, and to justify ethics metaphysically. To do this, both philosophers engage in what each calls “affirmation.” For Nietzsche and Aurobindo, there are two aspects of affirmation: “affirming” the world is at once an embrace of realism and an ethical mandate to fully engage with the activity of life and struggle towards higher states of life, rather than abandoning life. In my discussions of metaphysics, I show how the Will to Power and līlā are each used to affirm realism and solve the problems of “the One and the Many” and “Being and Becoming.” In my discussion of ethics, I discuss how each deconstructs conventional ethics and builds a new ethical system based around the overcoming of ego and society. Nietzsche and Aurobindo each construe human ethics as makeshift and socially constructed, and advocate living “beyond good and evil.” Considering what lifeaffirmation really entails as a positive ethic, I also delve into each philosopher’s interest in the “overcoming” of the self, illustrated by the example of a “superman.” In the fourth and final chapter, I highlight some of the most compelling affinities in their renditions of becoming, affirmation, and supraethics, building up to the unifying metaphysicalethical principles they each use to justify all of those efforts: the Will to Power
18 and līlā. This connection is at the heart of the matter. I conclude with thoughts on how these theories reflected and anticipated global shifts in philosophical thought.
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Chapter 1: Intellectual Context
“The materialism of the nineteenth century gave place first to a novel and profound vitalism which has taken various forms from Nietzsche’s theory of the Will to be and Will to Power as the root and law of life to the new pluralistic and pragmatic philosophy which is pluralistic because it has its eye fixed on life rather than on the soul and pragmatic because it seeks to interpret being in the terms of force and action rather than of sight and knowledge.” Aurobindo Ghose, The Human Cycle, p. 30
1. Global Impacts of Modernity: Idealism, Romanticism, Orientalism, and Darwinism The dialectics of modernity underlie Nietzsche’s and Aurobindo’s philosophical projects. Each writes in the context of a transcontinental, crosscultural conversation about metaphysical idealism. This philosophical trend intersected with the Romantic and postRomantic era and its ideologies, in a context in which many nations looked backwards to an imagined “golden age” as a rubric for forging a new future through “renaissance.” This phenomenon, common to Europe and India, was inflected by Orientalist attitudes and scholarship in Europe that grew out of colonial encounters in Asia. A trend towards secularization, as evolutionary theories swept the world following the publication of The Origin of Species in 1859, provided additional context. After sketching these global themes—showing, in each instance, that they are reflected in the work of each philosopher—I
20 look
more
closely
at
the
German
Oriental
Renaissance
and
the
Indian
Renaissance—movements in which these larger trends played out locally. Regarding these movements, I turn an eye to the ways each philosopher consumed, comprehended, and evaluated material from one another’s cultures, showing that this engagement was formative for each. Nietzsche and Aurobindo each respond to the tradition of philosophical idealism they inherit in their respective cultural contexts.7 At the dawn of the 19th century, idealism had become prominent not only in Germany and India, but around the world. America, England, China, and the Middle East all saw philosophical movements that embraced idealism in this period. In England, neoHegelianism loomed large, reflected in the work of T. H. Green, F. H. Bradley, James McTaggart and others. Modern Indian Vedānta philosophers engaged with German Idealism, reflecting the fact that both traditions engage with metaphysical questions about the relation of the one to the many, and of being to becoming. Discussions on the nature of Brahman have clear parallels to debates about the nature of being. The preoccupations of prominent German Idealists with Vedānta are probably related to this parallel play. Muslim philosophers, like Muhammad Iqbal (18771938), in India and
7 In philosophy, metaphysical idealism generally refers to the idea that underlying existence
is an entity beyond the physical world—that beneath the world of appearance is an underlying unifying principle, be it mind, will, soul, or idea.
21 elsewhere were connecting Western idealism to mystic traditions like Sufism.8 The American Transcendentalists provide a clear example of an American movement towards idealism, developing their philosophy in the context of the liberalization in the Unitarian church, European Romanticism, German Idealism, Native American thought, and the influx of oriental scholarship from Europe.9 Later in the century, Josiah Royce (18551916) came to prominence as an objective idealist philosopher at Harvard. In China, prominent modern philosophers like Wang Guowei (18771927) and Zhang Dongsun (18661973) focused on metaphysical idealism, reviving the idealist Yogācāra tradition, which describes the world as “mindonly.”10 It is not within the purview of this paper go into detail about these related phenomena, but they are worth noting as examples of a global trend. My reconstructions of Nietzsche and Aurobindo’s philosophical systems in chapters two and three will show that each focused on contesting idealism.
ii. Romanticism Idealism was everywhere, and so was the promise of a “renaissance”—a reinvigoration of culture through the revival of an imagined golden age. This trend was rooted
8 Muhammad Iqbal, The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, trans. M. Saeed
Sheikh, 2013. Muhammad Iqbal, the famous mysticphilosopher and poet of Lahore wrote metaphysical constructions that are stunningly similar to Aurobindo’s, despite the unlikelihood that these two philosophers read each other’s work. That affinity—which deserves more treatment than I can give here—most likely reflects that both men studied at Cambridge and steeped in the same philosophical milieu, and that of them were engaged in the project of modernizing their respective traditions. 9 Richard Sayre, Thoreau and the American Indian (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977). 10 John Makeham, Transforming Consciousness: Yogācāra Thought in Modern China, 2014.
22 in the ideologies produced by the Romantic Movement in Europe (approx. 18001850). This movement emerged in response to modernity, resisting the ethos of industrialization, aristocracy, and the emphasis on rationality that arose from the Enlightenment. Its proponents—aristocratic artists, writers, and intellectuals—preferred a “return” to more intuitive, more personal modes of interpretation and expression, guided by passion, beauty (particularly the sublime aesthetic) and spiritual freedom. Many European Romantics also looked to the natural world for orientation. These sensibilities extended beyond the artistic lives of individuals—they were also applied to national identity, which they rendered as spiritual, rather than geographical. This Romantic nationalism expressed a spiritual continuity with a glorified past taken to represent the true spirit of the nation, in contrast to the perceived modern degeneration of that nation. Of course, these renaissance narratives did not advocate a spiritual identification with all or any part of the past; rather, Romantic historiography emphasized a mythic, spiritual golden age, guided by beauty, freedom, and passion. For this reason, as we will see, a fantasy of Indian origins became appealing to German Romantics. Nietzsche and Aurobindo each appeal to Renaissance tropes. Though Nietzsche criticizes the Romantics, he expresses Romantic sensibilities, reaching back to the Tragic Age in Greek antiquity as a golden age of aesthetic creation. He also glorifies a vision of barbaric noble aristocracy as a golden age of high culture and politics. His romantic tendencies, so apparent in his first publication The Birth of Tragedy (1872), do not abate as he ages: much of his language in On the Genealogy of Morals (1887), for instance, also reflects his admiration for Greek nobility. And though he did not romanticize Indian philosophy as ardently as his
23 contemporaries did, Nietzsche also accepted the premise of the German Oriental Renaissance: that German culture stemmed from Aryan culture in classical India. Despite the unsettling racial theory that peppers his writings—which was also rooted in Romantic historiography—Nietzsche does not assume that cultures generally become more civilized.11 He argues, “'Progress' is just a modern idea, which is to say a false idea. Today's European is still worth considerably less than the Renaissance European; development is not linked to elevation, increase, or strengthening in any necessary way.”12 He does, however, hope for circumstances to evolve which would encourage excellent individuals can come about: “In another sense, there is a continuous series of individual successes in the most varied places on earth and from the most varied cultures; here, a higher type does in fact present itself, a type of overman in relation to humanity in general.”13 That is, he hopes for a future modeled on past golden ages that might allow some great individuals to thrive. Aurobindo, who studied English Romantic literature at Cambridge, reached to ancient India as a model for Indian modernity. His essay The Renaissance in India (1918) reveals his commitment to this popular theme. He argues that “renaissance” for India is not an overturning of the current order, but a “reawakening” of a latent energy that once dominated the spiritual life of the nation. He draws a clear contrast to the idea of renaissance in Europe: The word carries the mind back to the turningpoint of European culture to which it was first applied; that was not so much a reawakening as an overturn and reversal, a seizure of Christianised, Teutonised, feudalised Europe by the 11 Nietzsche, AC 19 — “the stronger races of northern Europe,” GM 2:7 – “Negroes (taken as
representatives of prehistoric man—)” and GM 1:5 – “the distinguishing word for nobility, finally for the good, noble, pure, originally meant the blond headed, in contradistinction to the dark, blackhaired aboriginal inhabitants,” for instance. 12 Nietzsche, AC 4 13 Ibid., 4
24 old GraecoLatin spirit and form with all the complex and momentous results which came from it. That is certainly not a type of renaissance that is at all possible in India.14 The colonial context is important here. Aurobindo maintains that if there have been corrupting forces in India, they have come from the outside; from English imperialism. He sees a similar model in Ireland, writing, “in Ireland this was discovered by a return to the Celtic spirit and culture after a long period of eclipsing English influences, and in India something of the same kind of movement is appearing…”15 For this reason, he prefers the term “renascence.” Still, Aurobindo inherits a modern preoccupation with glorified origins and future renaissances.
ii. Orientalism Though these Romantic ideologies were brewing in Europe long before extensive English contact in India, they were transformed and redirected during the colonial period as many Westerners began looking for their cultural origins in the East. The colonial occupation of India began quietly with the founding of the East India Trade Company in 1600, which exercised colonial rule in India by the mid 1700’s, despite that India was not “given” to the Queen of England until 1858. The Romanticization of Indian antiquity was facilitated by the orientalist scholarship of a few English civil servants who arrived in occupied India around 1780. Under the governance of William Hastings, these thinkers colluded with the East India Trade Company to form the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1784, organized to gather
14 Aurobindo, The Renaissance in India, 9. 15 Ibid., 4.
25 information about Indian culture in order to support British administration, trade, and conquest. Many of these British orientalists—among them William Jones, Charles Wilkins, and Henry T. Colebrook—became interested in comparative linguistics.16 Their discoveries of similarities between European languages and Sanskrit suggested a link between modern Europeans and ancient Aryans. This suggestion set the European imagination afire. Even before oriental scholarship made its way to the West, Raymond Schwab writes, “Curiosity about the Orient and its languages was seething everywhere.”17 Schwab argues that European interest in the East catalyzed such radical changes in European culture that the period of its fruition is best referred to as an “Oriental Renaissance.”18 As the term suggests, the ideology of the Oriental Renaissance in Europe featured a glittering vision of a Golden Age promising to illuminate a pathway to an inevitable and superior future. This gesture toward the past was partially motivated by a diffuse anxiety that European intellectual life had fallen into a vast “nihilism” brought on by spiritual emptiness, materialism (in both the metaphysical and cultural sense), and alienation. By the beginning of the 19th century, Romantics were smitten with sources on Indian thought trickling into the country through translations by English and French scholars in India: namely, the Bhagavadgītā, translated into English by Charles Wilkins in 1784, and the Latin translation of the Upaniṣads by A. H. AnquetilDuperron at the turn of the century. Publications of The
16 Where “orientalism” is not capitalized, I refer only to the scholastic study of the East: to the
profession or vocation of orientalism, as it was called then. Where I capitalize the word to refer to a specific historical phenomena relating to widespread infatuation with India, I am referring to “European Orientalism” or “German Orientalism.” 17 Raymond Schwab, The Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Rediscovery of India and the East, 16801880 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 34. 18 Schwab, Oriental Renaissance.
26 Laws of Manu and Sakuntala; or, The Fatal Ring translated by William Jones also became popular. 19 These texts circulated among members of the intellectual elite, who believed the East still housed the perennial wisdom of mankind. They were convinced that even the wisdom of Greece and Rome that so preoccupied the Romantic Movement had been derived from India. On this view, as William Halbfass summarizes, “the Orient was the infant state, and thus innocent, pure, and with unexhausted potential. Hellenism was adolescence, Rome adulthood. The Orient represents Europe’s own childhood.”20 Romantic thinkers, already disillusioned with Western modernity—looked to India as the mythic spring that fed their own culture. They searched the literature of India for evidence of what went wrong in the West. This sense of Western “wrongness” was often characterized as a failure to achieve unity and oneness.21 The wisdom of the Upaniṣads, many thought, could provide a remedy. The exchange of ideas between Europe and India during this period was circular. While many Western ideas made their way to India and were creatively appropriated by Indian philosophers, many Indian thinkers came to impact Westerners, particularly by the mid19th century, and caused seismic changes in Westerners’ perceptions of their own traditions. Orientalism was embedded in a multidirectional discourse in which both Europeans and Indians directed their assessments both towards themselves and towards the other. Both Europeans and Indians defined orientalist discourses.
19 William Halbfass, India and Europe: An Essay in Understanding (Albany, NY: State
University of New York Press, 1988), 9–10. 20 William Halbfass, “India and the Romantic Critique of the Present,” in India and Europe: An Essay in Understanding (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1988), 69–84. 21 Halbfass, India and Europe, 72.
27
iii. Darwinism Darwin’s discovery of natural selection was influential on many philosophers, including Nietzsche and Aurobindo. Intellectuals of the modern world, propelled by Enlightenment ideology, grew more willing to accept materialism, mechanism, and biological accounts of the world. This tendency was in direct tension with the ideology of Romanticism, which resisted scientific reductionism and imagined the course of history as declining, rather than progressing. This tension was a significant current in European intellectual life. Darwin provided a purely biological explanation for the diversity of life, casting doubt on the assumption that the complexity and diversity of the natural world could only be explained by appealing to a creator or an external force. The Origin of Species was revolutionary not only to biologists, but also to philosophers, who began to account for the process of evolution in their metaphysical speculations. John Dewey describes Darwinism as a crisis that unsettled the foundations of Western philosophy: The conceptions that had reigned in the philosophy of nature and knowledge for two thousand years, the conceptions that had become the familiar furniture of the mind, rested on the assumption of the superiority of the fixed and final; they rested upon treating change and origin as signs of defect and unreality. In laying hands upon the sacred ark of absolute permanency, in treating the forms that had been regarded as types of fixity and perfection as originating and passing away, the "Origin of Species " introduced a mode of thinking that in the end was bound to transform the logic of knowledge, and hence the treatment of morals, politics, and religion.22
22 John Dewey, “The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy,” in The Influence of Darwin on
Philosophy and Other Essays (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1910), 1–2.
28 Suddenly, it seemed possible that all of existence could be merely natural. It also supported the idea that the world was constantly changing—that there could be no eternal forms or ideas to which species correspond. Dewey describes this revelation as a crisis yielding: two alternative courses. We must either find the appropriate objects and organs of knowledge in the mutual interactions of changing things; or else, to escape the infection of change, we must seek them in some transcendent and supernal region.23 Unlike many of their contemporaries, Nietzsche and Aurobindo each take the first course. Each accepts that the world is constantly changing, and engages in the shared project of naturalizing metaphysics in accordance with this fact. Each constructs a description of existence that reconciles realism and idealism. Each also attempt to explain the evolution of species in an alternate naturalistic framework; but each responds by positing a version of vitalism rather than accepting the Darwinian theory of natural selection, as each understands it. Though Nietzsche accepts the fact of evolution, he sees himself as an opponent of Darwin, pitting his theory of the Will to Power against Darwin’s natural selection. Instead of accepting that certain traits persevere merely because they aid survival, he suggests that the Will to Power acts as the single force that drives living things to thrive, reproduce, and change. He writes that, "Useful" in the sense of Darwinist biology means: proved advantageous in the struggle with others. But it seems to me that the feeling of increase, the feeling of becoming stronger, is itself, quite apart from any usefulness in the struggle, the real progress: only from this feeling does there arise the will to struggle.”24 23 Ibid., 6–7. 24 Nietzsche, WP 3:649
29
Curiously, he understands Darwinian natural selection as a failure of reductionism to completely reduce. In his view, the vitalistic Will to Power is the only unifying principle needed to explain every aspect of the physical world. In Nietzsche's view, Darwinism fails to account for “the will to struggle” in all of nature. Nietzsche posits that “a living thing wants above all to discharge its force: ‘preservation’ is only a consequence of this. Beware of superfluous teleological principles! The entire concept "instinct of preservation" is one of them.”25 Aurobindo is also ambivalent towards Darwinism, even as he tries to account for it. Mackenzie Brown writes, “Much of Aurobindo’s integral yoga was an attempt to integrate elements of Western evolutionary science”26 and identifies the following passage from a collection of Aurobindo’s letters titled “The purpose of Avatarhood,” in which Aurobindo writes, “First the Fish Avatar, then the amphibious animal between land and water, then the land animal, then the lionman Avatar, bridging man and animal…” This passage, which refers to the Avatars of Viṣṇu, also evokes Darwinian evolution.27 He developed his evolutionary theory based partly on insights from Indian traditions, particularly as transmitted in the Vedas, the Upaniṣads, and the Bhagavadgītā, as well as Sāṃkhya metaphysics. He also uses Darwinian theory as an illustration for the eventual evolution of human life into spiritual life. In The Life Divine, he writes,
25 Ibid, 3:650 26 Mackenzie C. Brown, “Colonial and PostColonial Elaborations of Avataric Evolutionism,”
in Situating Sri Aurobindo: A Reader, ed. Peter Heehs (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2013), 236. 27 Quoted in Ibid., 242.
30 We are in respect to our possible higher evolution much in the position of the original Ape of the Darwinian theory. It would have been impossible for that Ape leading his instinctive arboreal life in primeval forests to conceive that there would be one day an animal on the earth who would use a new faculty called reason upon the materials of his inner and outer existence, who would dominate by that power his instincts and habits, change the circumstances of his physical life, build for himself houses of stone, manipulate Nature’s forces, sail the seas, ride the air, develop codes of conduct, evolve conscious methods for his mental and spiritual development.28 Aurobindo’s attempts to account for the evolution of species diverge from Darwinism here. While he does accept Darwin’s empirical findings, conceding that species evolve into new types over generations, he does not believe the world could evolve by blind chance, and maintains that it must be a part of a universal consciousness that mediates the evolutionary process. Aurobindo’s own conception of spiritual evolution, which I will investigate in chapter 3, extends far beyond the material world. Aurobindo complains that natural selection cannot account for the fact that one kind of thing can evolve into a radically different kind of thing: that matter, for instance, can evolve into life. He is also skeptical that apes could evolve into men. Aurobindo makes his misunderstanding of Darwin obvious, as in this instance: All the facts show that a type can vary within its own specification of nature, but there is nothing to show that it can go beyond it. It has not yet been really established that apekind developed into man; for it would rather seem that a type resembling the ape, but always characteristic of itself and not of apehood, developed within its own tendencies of nature and became what we know as man, the present human being.29
Aurobindo is unable to relinquish the strong boundaries he draws around different types of 28 Aurobindo, The Life Divine, 10th ed., The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo 2122
(Pondicherry, India: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust, 2005), 60. 29 Ibid., 861.
31 beings, despite his insistence that all forms are ultimately one in Brahman. As we will see, these global themes inflected the local discourses in the German Oriental Renaissance and the Indian Renaissance that constituted the intellectual environments in which Nietzsche and Aurobindo wrote. And as we will also see, the ideologies of these movements were interconnected.
2. Nietzsche and the German Oriental Renaissance The German Oriental Renaissance in particular exemplifies the tendency to reach for ancient India, as opposed to Greece, as a model golden age. This movement also surrounded Nietzsche, who both colluded and struggled with its ideology. Tracing his intellectual roots to the “Oriental Renaissance” in Germany connects Nietzsche to a movement already challenging central tenets of Western philosophy. In many ways, the Indian Renaissance was a reaction to European attitudes towards Indian thought. Of course, there is no way to identify which ideas came “first,” since many of the insights of the German Oriental Renaissance were gleaned from Classical Indian thought, and since Indians also shaped modern discourses about India in the West. By the early 19th century, German intellectuals embraced the European Oriental Renaissance.30 The European Oriental Renaissance lasted through the entire 19th century, but it peaked from the 1830s to the 1850s at a time when Germany was producing what he
30 Stephen Cross, “Schopenhauer in Context: The ‘Oriental Renaissance,’” in Schopenhauer’s
Encounter with Indian Thought: Representation and Will and Their Indian Parallels (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, 2013), 9–19.
32 believes was the best scholarly material on the East.31 Suzanne Marchand contends that the Germans “were indisputably the most important orientalist scholars between about 1830 and 1930, despite having virtually no colonies in the East.”32 Friedrich Schlegel (17721829), one of the earliest and most adamant proponents of the German Oriental Renaissance, imagined that “Indic” studies would revolutionize European thought, insisting that the close study of Indian philosophy would have effects as far reaching as that of the Renaissance in Europe that the 14th17th centuries.33 During this period, the concept of ancient Aryan culture seized the popular imagination of German citizens, who consumed the sensational books and plays introduced by Jones and other orientalists. Sanskrit studies popped up in German academies, and even primary and secondary schools taught Indian thought to German children. Much was made of the resonance between German Idealism and Upaniṣadic Idealism. Nietzsche, born in 1844 at the peak of the Oriental Renaissance, absorbed its basic assumptions. Nietzsche was born in Leipzig and educated at an elite private school—Schulpforta—where he learned classical languages before pursuing philology and theology at the University of Bonn in 1864. He taught classical philology at the University of Basel in Switzerland until 1878, and wrote philosophy independently until his mental breakdown in 1889 and death a year later. German Orientalism was distinct from similar phenomena in England and France.
31 Schwab, Oriental Renaissance. 32 Suzanne Marchand, “German Orientalism and the Decline of the West,” Proceedings of the
American Philosophical Society 145, no. 4 (December 1, 2001): 465–73. p. 465 33 Vasant Kaiwar, “The Aryan Model of History,” in Antinomies of Modernity: Essays on Race, Orient, Nation, ed. Mazumdar Sucheta and Vasant Kaiwar (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003), 24–25.
33 German interest in India was certainly fraught with the racism, exotification, and essentialism endemic to the British and French oriental scholarship, but in the German context, widespread infatuation with Indian literature, philosophy, and culture helped catalyze challenges to German modernity. Marchand argues that German orientalism “helped to destroy Western selfsatisfaction, and to provoke a momentous change in the culture of the west: the relinquishing of Christianity and classical antiquity as universal norms.”34 She argues that much of the impetus for and effect of philological oriental research was to debunk the validity of the Bible and loosen the grip of Theology on the German Academy. German Indophilia helped to unsettle Eurocentrism and usher in a new tendency towards cosmopolitanism. Sheldon Pollock argues, “in the case of German Indology, we might conceive of [the vector of orientalist knowledge] as potentially directed inward—toward the colonization and domination of Europe itself.”35 The movement engaged the German Romantics. Steven Cross writes, “Most of the leading figures of the Romantic movement were caught up with this—Herder and Goethe among the older writers; the two Schlegel brothers, Novalis, and Schelling and his disciples among the younger, to name but some.”36 Nietzsche was influenced by all of these thinkers in varying degrees.37 Johann Gottfried von Herder (17441803) followed the budding field of
34 Marchand, “German Orientalism and the Decline of the West,” 467–473. 35 Carol Appadurai Breckenridge, Peter van der Veer, and South Asia Seminar, eds.,
Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 77. 36 Cross, “Schopenhauer in Context: The ‘Oriental Renaissance,’” 10. 37 Thomas H Brobjer, “Table 1. Chronological Listing of Nietzsche’s Philosophical Reading,” in Nietzsche’s Philosophical Context: An Intellectual Biography (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 185–237, http://site.ebrary.com/id/10532402.
34 Indology closely and admiringly, and, like many other European readers of Indian thought, he counted Pantheism as one of its most important themes.38 Nietzsche was influenced by Herder’s theory of the mind, history, and values.39 Friedrich Schlegel was first German to become fluent in Sanskrit in 1803. “All, all springs from India without exception,” F. Schlegel wrote.40 He was originally interested in pantheism, but eventually switched his emphasis, and considered the doctrine of emanation the most important Indian lesson. Nietzsche read Schlegel, and was influenced particularly by his theory of tragedy. F. W. Schelling (1775–1854), one of the most important German Idealists and a thinker whose critique of Hegelianism was important to Nietzsche, was another of German Orientalism’s early enthusiasts. 41 His careful reading of the Bhagavadgītā is reflected in his commitment to pantheism.42 Feuerbach once described Schelling’s philosophy as a vehicle that brought “the old Oriental identity onto Germanic soil.”43 Even Richard Wagner (18131883), who Nietzsche initially idolized, was caught up in the fervor. Halbfass tells us that Wagner, “following Schopenhauer, concerned himself closely with Buddhism for a time and even planned a Buddhist opera (Die Sieger, ‘The Victors’), based on the
38 Halbfass, “India and the Romantic Critique of the Present.” p. 71 39 Michael Forster, “Johann Gottfried von Herder,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, Summer 2015, 2015, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2015/entries/herder/. 40 Quoted in Cross, “Schopenhauer in Context: The ‘Oriental Renaissance.’” p. 12 41 Andrew Bowie, “Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, Winter 2010, 2010, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2010/entries/schelling/. 42 Jason Wirth (2003) has shown that Schelling’s reading of the Bhagavadgītā is strikingly similar to Aurobindo’s. 43 Quoted in Halbfass, “India and the Romantic Critique of the Present,” 8.
35 Śārdūlakarṇāvadāna.”44 Arthur Schopenhauer (17881860), one of Nietzsche’s most profound influences, was also one of the most prominent figures in the German Oriental Renaissance. He studied Indian thought ardently for most of his adult life.45 His attitude towards Indian philosophy represents broader attitudes of the German Oriental Renaissance. Schopenhauer even identified at various points as a Buddhist, and may have been the first Westerner to be so regarded. According to Steven Cross, “Schopenhauer was not the most extreme, but he proved to be the most tenacious holder of the attitudes characterizing the Oriental Renaissance.”46 In the 1844 edition of The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer writes of “those sublime authors of the Upaniṣads of the Vedas, who can scarcely be conceived as mere human beings” that “we must ascribe this immediate illumination of their mind to the fact that, standing nearer to the origin of our race as regards time, these sages apprehended the inner essence of things more clearly and profoundly than the already enfeebled race, ‘as mortals now are,’ is capable of doing.”47 Like many of his Romantic contemporaries, Schopenhauer was dazzled by the image of India’s golden age, but unlike many of them, his interest persisted until his last days. Elsewhere, he calls the Vedas “the fruit of the highest
44 Halbfass, India and Europe, 124. 45 By his death, Schopenhauer had a library of over 130 books relating to Eastern thought.
Like many of his peers, he first came to Indian philosophy in through Antequil Deuperron’s Latin translation from a Persian version the Upaniṣads, titled Oupnek’hat, which he loved throughout his life. Like many of his compatriots, he also read Wilkins’s English translation of the Bhagavadgītā, and The Laws of Manu. R. K. Das Gupta (1962) supposes that he came to this text and others through the writings of Friedrich Mayer, Goethe, and Schlegel. 46 Cross, “Schopenhauer in Context: The ‘Oriental Renaissance.’” p. 11 47 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation., trans. E. F. J Payne (New York: Dover Publications, 1966), 475.
36 human knowledge and wisdom, the kernel of which has finally come to us in the Upanishads as the greatest gift to the nineteenth century.”48 Schopenhauer developed his own philosophy from his Indian sources. As I will show in chapter two, Schopenhauer effectively adapted Śaṅkara’s theory of māyā and passed it on to the young Nietzsche. Though Nietzsche peppers his later writings with quips about Schopenhauer’s failures, he was a Schopenhauerian through and through during his early productive years. 49 He encountered Schopenhauer in 1865, and read his collected works many times over the course of his life. Nietzsche’s infatuation with Schopenhauer is at its peak when he writes The Birth of Tragedy in 1872. Nietzsche is aware of the connection of Schopenhauer’s metaphysical schema to Indian thought. After Schopenhauer, he even refers to the illusory nature of the world as the “veil of maya.”50 In 1876, he writes in his glowing essay “Schopenhauer as Educator,” I am one of those readers of Schopenhauer who when they have read one page of him know for certain they will go on to read all the pages and will pay heed to every word he ever said. I trusted him at once and my trust is the same now as it was nine years ago. […] Thus it is that I have never discovered any paradox in him… 51 By 1882, Nietzsche began a revaluation of Schopenhauer’s philosophy. Paul Deussen (1845–1919), who attended secondary school with Nietzsche, also demands special attention because the two remained lifelong friends and followed one another’s philosophical development. Deussen, who gave himself the Sanskrit name
48 Ibid., 355. 49 Thomas H. Brobjer, “Nietzsche’s Reading About Eastern Philosophy,” The Journal of
Nietzsche Studies 28, no. 1 (2004): 12. 50 Nietzsche, BT 1 51 Nietzsche, SE
37 DevaSena, was a strong advocate of and convert to Hinduism. Swami Vivekananda (18631902) writes in his 1886 account, “On Dr. Paul Deussen,” that the young orientalist is “the truest friends of India and Indian thought.”52 At Nietzsche’s prompting, Deussen had already been inspired by the Germanophilic romanticism of Richard Wagner.53 As Nietzsche put it, “Wagner is Schopenhauerian in his attempt to conceive of Christianity as a seed of Buddhism that has drifted far and to prepare a Buddhistic age for Europe.”54 Also at Nietzsche’s instigation, Deussen was a lifelong follower and advocate of Schopenhauer; Deussen has been credited with (or accused of) giving Advaita Vedānta a strongly “Schopenhauerian bend” in his book, The System of the Vedānta, which became a popular source in both Europe and India. 55 Marchand emphasizes Deussen’s significance to the German Orientalists largely, and especially to Nietzsche: It was from Deussen that most Germans learned to associate the Orient with Schopenhauer; Nietzsche learned much of what he knew about Indian philosophy from Deussen and his works, and it was surely through Deussen that the Basel philosopher learned to see India through a Schopenhauerian lens. […] In his ceaseless advocacy of Schopenhauer, culminating in the founding of the Schopenhauer Gesellschaft in 1911, and his updating of the philosopher to make him speak to a neoromantic public, Deussen was instrumental in cementing elective affinities between the culturally pessimistic avantgarde and the early Aryan world.56 52 Vivekananda, The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda. (Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama,
1970), 396. 53 Suzanne L Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race, and Scholarship (Washington, D.C.; Cambridge; New York: German Historical Institute ; Cambridge University Press, 2009), 470. 54 Nietzsche, GS 2:99 55 Paul Deussen, The System of the Vedânta: According to Bâdarâyaṇa’s BrahmaSûtras and Çan̄ kara’s Commentary Thereon Set Forth as a Compendium of the Dogmatics of Brahmanism from the Standpoint of Çan̄ kara (New York: Dover Publications, 1973). 56 Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire, 308.
38
A Schopenhauerian reading of Indian Philosophy was made easy for Deussen because Schopenhauer’s work shows deep roots in and affinities with both Mahāyāna Buddhism and Advaita Vedānta. Nietzsche took the assumptions of the Oriental Renaissance for granted. Brobjer writes: “Nietzsche also assumes that many of the fundamental cultural influences on ancient Greece and on Europe had their origin in Asia. In the 1880s he frequently compares Christianity and modernity negatively to different aspects of Eastern philosophy.”57 He also emphasizes, in notebooks from his years teaching in Basel, that Greek philosophy had learned much from “the Orient.”58 Nietzsche also studied Indian thought more directly. Despite his lack of expertise, Nietzsche read rather a lot on the subject, and there are many instances at which his reading seems to have been influential. Halbfass observes that though “in the vast literature on Nietzsche and Nietzschean topics, this subject has received relatively little strictly biographical and philological attention, […] Nietzsche took a serious and philosophically significant interest in the Indological discoveries of his day, assimilating them in the passionate manner that so distinguished his thought.”59 Evidence of Nietzsche’s interest in Indian philosophy dates to his teenage years, when he began to part with Christianity and briefly considered some Asian conceptions of religiosity as an alternative. For his seventeenth birthday in 1861, he requested Fonseca's
57 Brobjer, “Nietzsche’s Reading About Eastern Philosophy,” 3. 58 Ibid., 7. 59 Halbfass, India and Europe, 124.
39 Mythologie des altes Indien (1856), though he did not receive it.60 In his youth, his exposure to Indian thought was mediated through teachers. Still, Johann Figl’s “consideration of the unpublished manuscripts of Nietzsche’s lecture notes on the history of philosophy shows that he was exposed at this early stage to Indian thought in a fairly comprehensive manner.”61 Nietzsche’s first philosophical essay at Schulpforta refers to Indian thought.62 When he later attended a course on history of philosophy at the University of Bonn, he produced more than two full pages of notes on discussions of Indian philosophy, despite the fact that the topic was explicitly excluded from the course.63 Schopenhauer was of course another important conduit of Indian thought during this period. Though he was ultimately to become more versed in Vedānta philosophy thanks to his friend Paul Deussen, his interest in Schopenhauer originally led him to researching Buddhism. In the 1870’s, Nietzsche read C. F. Koeppen’s Die Religion des Buddha among other books on Buddhism.64 At the same time, he read the orientalist Max Müller’s Essays on India, copying long excerpts from both. In 1875, he writes to a friend: “I have, with a sort of increasing thirst precisely during the last two months, looked towards India.”65 That year, he read Culturgeschichte (1874) by F. A Hellwald, which discusses Asian cultures among others.
60 David (David James) Smith, “Nietzsche’s Hinduism, Nietzsche’s India: Another Look,” The
Journal of Nietzsche Studies 28, no. 1 (2004): 51, doi:10.1353/nie.2004.0015. 61 Johann Figl, “Nietzsche’s Early Encounters with Asian Thought,” ed. and trans. Graham Parkes, 1st ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 51. 62 Brobjer, “Nietzsche’s Reading About Eastern Philosophy,” 3. 63 Ibid., 4. These notes are unpublished, but they are available at the GoetheSchiller archive in Weimar, Germany 64 Michael Hulin, “Nietzsche and The Suffering of the Indian Ascetic,” ed. Graham Parkes, 1st ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 64–75. 65 Quoted in Brobjer, “Nietzsche’s Reading About Eastern Philosophy,” 10.
40 He also bought Confucious’s TaHao and Laotse’s Der Weg zu Tugend, borrowed Max Müller’s Einleitung in die vergleichende Religionswissenschaft, and enjoyed Otto Böhtlingk’s Indische Sprüche, apparently reading it twice.66 The figure of Zarathustra was inspired by another text Nietzsche valued: anthropologist Friedrich von Hellwald's 839page Culturgeschichte in ihrer natürlichen Entstehung bis zur Gegenwart (1874), which he read at least three times, in 1875, 1881, and 1883. The book also seems to have given him the impression of Buddhism as “nihilism.”67 In 1876, he tried to help his colleague and former student who lectured on Brahmanism, Jacob Wackernagel (18531938), to publish papers on Buddhism. Nietzsche followed Wackernagel’s work even after leaving Bonn, and in 1880 he carefully read and copied extensive excerpts from his former colleague’s booklet on Indian philosophy, “Über den Ursprung des Brahmanismus.” Brobjer believes this book renewed Nietzsche’s postSchopenhauerian interest in India, and that “It was critically important in that it “helped Nietzsche develop his concept of ‘feeling for power’ (which later he would further develop in his ‘will to power’).” 68 Nietzsche seems to have read H. Oldenburg’s classic 459 page volume on Buddhism three times: in 1882, 1884, and 1888 (his final productive year). Brobjer also points out that Nietzsche’s “discovery” of the eternal recurrence coincided with the period he was rereading Hellwald for the second time, and suggests it may not be a coincidence that Hellwald discusses Hindu theories of eternal
66 Ibid. 67 Ibid., 13. 68 Ibid.
41 recurrence in his book.69 In 1883, Nietzsche received his friend Deussen’s Das System des Vedānta, read it immediately, and copied long passages into his notebooks. He read Deussen’s massive translation of Die Sutras des Vedānta in 1887, and the two discussed Indian philosophy at great length in person shortly afterwards.70 Taking these striking instances alongside a sprinkling of other readings, Nietzsche’s fairly comprehensive exposure to Indian thought comes into view. Ralph Waldo Emerson (18031882) also led Nietzsche to Indian thought, despite that he was not affiliated with the German Oriental Renaissance.71 Emerson was a strong influence on Nietzsche, and may have sparked his interest in Indian thought at age eighteen. Brobjer notes that in his second essay written at Schulpforta in 1862, Nietzsche wrote “The Hindu says: Fate is nothing but the acts we have committed in a prior state of our being,” and notes that “This sentence is a direct quote from Emerson’s essay, ‘Fate’ in The Conduct of Life, as are several of the other statements in the essay.”72 Emerson addresses concepts like the Brahmanlike “OverSoul,” his Heraclitian notion of the constant process of Nature as seen in his essay, “Circles,” and the illusory nature of life, as emphasized in “Experience.”
69 Brobjer, “Nietzsche’s Reading About Eastern Philosophy.” 70 Ibid., 17. 71
Indeed, Schopenhauer and Emerson were equally important influences on Nietzsche. Nietzsche fell in love with Emerson at age eighteen and maintained a respect for his work throughout his life. Walter Kaufmann reminds us, in his introduction to The Gay Science (1974) that “Emerson was one of Nietzsche’s great loves ever since he read him as a schoolboy… He not only read him but also copied dozens of passages into notebooks and wrote extensively on the margins and flyleaves of his copy of the Essays. In 1874 he lost a bag with a volume of Emerson in it, but soon bought another copy.” Even though Nietzsche’s thought underwent significant change over his life, he never abandoned Emerson. 72 Brobjer, “Nietzsche’s Reading About Eastern Philosophy,” 5.
42 Emerson’s views in his later essays are inspired by his interest in Indian thought.73 He refers to the Indian philosophy of māyā in “Illusions,” writing, “The Hindoos, in their sacred writings, express the liveliest feeling, both of the essential identity, and of that illusion which they conceive variety to be” and proceeds to quote The Vishnu Purana, a Sanskrit work from around 500 B. C. E: “‘The notions, ‘I am’ and ‘This is mine,’ which influence mankind, are but delusions.’”74 Emerson follows this model of monistic idealism fairly straightforwardly. These essays certainly influenced Nietzsche. Nietzsche is clearly interested in Indian philosophy and thinks of it as a fruitful and legitimate enterprise. He says as much in his journals on several occasions, and often expresses the desire or intention to incorporate more Indian ways of thinking into his own.75 For instance, he writes in 1884, “I must learn to think more Orientally about philosophy and knowledge.”76 In 1875, he writes to Deussen from Basel to say that he hoped to learn more about Indian philosophical systems.77 In the same letter, he complains passionately about another scholar who dismissed Indian philosophy: Dear friend, you have really given me truly great joy with your letter […] My praise cannot be sufficient for you, but perhaps rather my desire to drink from the source which you will open to all of us. What I had to feel, when Prof. Windisch […] could say to me as he showed me the manuscript of a Sankhyatext: ‘Strange, these Indian have always philosophised, and always in the false direction! [immer in die Quere!]’ This 73
Arthur Christy et al., “EastWest Philosophy and Hinduism in America : NineteenthCentury Emerson” 51, no. 4 (1990): 625–45. 74 Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emerson’s Prose and Poetry, ed. Joel Porte and Saundra Morris (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001), 295. 75 Brobjer, “Nietzsche’s Reading About Eastern Philosophy,” 3. 76 Nietzsche, KSA 11: 26 [317], summerautumn 1884. 77 Hans Rollmann, “Deussen, Nietzsche, and Vedanta,” Journal of the History of Ideas 39, no. 1 (1978): 127.
43 ‘always in the false direction’ has for me become a byword for the insufficiency of our Indian philologists, and signifies their complete coarseness.78 He also complains of another philologist, (professor Brockhaus) who neglected in a lecture on Indian philology to mention that there was such a thing as Indian philosophy at all. When he finished reading Deussen’s Das System des Vedānta, he was effusive in his delight, writing: “That’s beautiful, dear old friend! That’s the way it should be done […] It is of great pleasure to me to once get to know the classical expression of the thoughtform foreign to me. Your book achieves this.”79 Over ten years later, he still describes his interest: after reading Deussen’s 1887 translation of the sutras, he writes about “an impressive new work by Dr. Deussen […] it so happened that I myself am strongly occupied with it [Indian philosophy], so that the books comes as an a propos.”80 Despite this positive assessment of Indian philosophy broadly, Nietzsche’s personal interest waned as he began to break from Schopenhauer and from his own early idealistic inclinations. Because of Schopenhauer, and because of Deussen’s Schopenhauerian rendition of Vedānta, Nietzsche understood Vedānta philosophy as an illusionist, worlddenying tradition that stood in as his archetype for perfect idealism.81 He mentions in the abovequoted letter to Deussen, “at the moment a manifesto of time is printed which says […] Yes! where your book says No!”82 He often expresses his opposition to these lifenegating traditions, and
78 Quoted in Brobjer, “Nietzsche’s Reading About Eastern Philosophy,” 9. 79 Rollmann, “Deussen, Nietzsche, and Vedanta,” 127. 80 Quoted in Brobjer, “Nietzsche’s Reading About Eastern Philosophy,” 16. 81 Of course, Nietzsche was perfectly aware of this association, having introduced Deussen to
Schopenhauer himself. 82 Ibid.
44 also refers to Buddhism as “the nihilistic catastrophe that finishes Indian culture.”83 He was convinced that metaphysical idealism and ethical nihilism were the most potent aspects of Indian philosophy, and, in his writing, he uses “Indian” philosophy as a symbol of these aspects. Ultimately, Nietzsche is ambivalent towards Indian thought. Despite caricaturing Vedānta somewhat, he finds many useful and inspiring ideas within the tradition. He appears to be most interested in asceticism and pessimism in Indian traditions. Though he argues against a certain kind of asceticism, he also admires another iteration he sees lived out by some yogis. As one might expect, Nietzsche lingered with particular eagerness over the potential for the yogis to accumulate power, which they can use even to defy the gods. He appreciated the yeasaying of the Laws of Manu, convinced it anticipated his philosophy of affirmation and finding its descriptions of political hierarchy and caste appealing. Nevertheless, Nietzsche criticized the book, calling it a product of the “worst of the priestly disposition,” among other attacks.84 He also seems to have appreciated the deconstruction of the self in Indian philosophy, using it to support his own critique: “(Indian critique: even the "ego" as apparent, as not real.)”85 He marvels that Vedāntins deny dualities, and usually cites them as predecessors to his destruction of the selfworld duality. In On the Genealogy of Morals, he writes of the Vedāntins, “To renounce belief in one’s ego, to deny one’s own ‘reality.’—what a triumph! not merely over the senses, over appearance, but a much higher kind of triumph, a
83 Nietzsche, WP 1:64 84 Brobjer, “Nietzsche’s Reading About Eastern Philosophy,” 17. 85 Nietzsche, WP 3:585
45 violation and cruelty against reason—a voluptuous pleasure that reaches its height […]”86 He was also pleased by the “universal” tendency of both Buddhism and Hinduism to go “beyond good and evil.”87 Despite his exposure to Indian philosophy and the confident opinions he offers on the subject, Nietzsche’s comprehension is limited. Brobjer concludes that his knowledge was “less than one would expect from someone who had been philosophically brought up on Schopenhauerian philosophy (and less than that of most of his friends and acquaintances).”88 David Smith contends that Nietzsche’s conception of the region constitutes “an India where no one lived but Nietzsche.”89 Many of his views on India reflect the popular German Orientalist imagination. Nietzsche’s reading of Asian thought came almost exclusively through the writings, translations, and analyses of Europeans, and many of these were faulty. Louis Jacolliot (18371890), for instance, whose almost bizarrely unfaithful rendering of The Laws of Manu was an important study for Nietzsche, infused disturbing racial theory into his translation. Like many of his contemporaries, Jacolliot also attempted to show that all that was good in German thought had its origins in the Aryans of early India. Despite his poor scholarship, Jacolliot heavily influenced other European intellectuals. Smith puts it nicely: “in his heyday, the 1870s, Jacolliot's Hinduism and Jacolliot's India were significant factors on the popular literary and cultural scene, not only in France but also in Britain, the United States, and India,
86 Nietzsche, GM 3:12 87 Nietzsche, GM 3:17 88 Brobjer, “Nietzsche’s Reading About Eastern Philosophy,” 3. 89 Smith, “Nietzsche’s Hinduism, Nietzsche’s India,” 53.
46 notwithstanding that they were the product of the imagination of a silly man.”90 Michael Hulin points out that, further, “[Nietzsche] regularly exaggerates, as did the Romantics, the antiquity of Indian civilization, representing it as having flourished four thousand years or more.”91 One of Nietzsche’s most important mistakes in this regard is his broad characterization of Indian philosophy as uniformly illusionist. While Nietzsche is aware of various schools of Indian philosophy—he references “shankya” in a letter to Deussen—he focuses on Buddhism and Vedānta. His contemporaries shared this focus. Deussen’s Schopenhauerian reading of the Upaniṣads—still influential today—influenced many of them. Phillips writes, “Deussen presents the view that is more or less accepted by modern scholarship concerning what the Upanishads say.”92 His reading was and remains influential in India as well, perhaps because NeoVedāntins, including Aurobindo, tended to use a caricature of Śaṅkara as a target for their critiques of illusionism, perhaps because Deussen set this standard. The German Oriental Renaissance that provided the atmosphere for Nietzsche’s Eastern education not only brought information from India back to Germany; it also represents a network of multidirectional exchanges of ideas between the two nations. As we will see, the preoccupations, myths, stereotypes, and categories that circulated among German Indologists came to bear on the reconstruction of modern Indian philosophy during the Indian Renaissance.
90 Ibid., 37. 91 Hulin, “Nietzsche and The Suffering of the Indian Ascetic,” 66. 92 Stephen H. Phillips, Aurobindo’s Philosophy of Brahman (Leiden, The Netherlands: E. J.
Brill, 1986), 57.
47 3. Aurobindo and the Indian Renaissance Aurobindo’s philosophical project was a conscious contribution to the Indian Renaissance. While the German Oriental Renaissance (approx. 18001860) was a 19th century phenomenon, the Indian Renaissance took place about 100 years later, gaining momentum by 1910 and culminating in India’s independence from the British in 1947. The projects of the two movements—each of which can be seen as a microcosm in which global concerns of modernity played out—are connected. English culture and philosophy were central preoccupations of the Indian Renaissance, whose principals wrote primarily in English. Members of Indian intellectual elites, versed in both Western thought and Classical Indian thought, often engaged with the ideology of European orientalism as they constructed an independent national identity around Vedic culture and Upaniṣadic idealist philosophy. Ram Mohan Roy (17721833), who founded the Brahmo Samaj in 1828, is often called the “father of the Indian Renaissance.” Roy and his fellow Brahmos were critical of Indian culture under the British, which they believed was in a state of decline, as manifested in idolatry, caste discrimination, and violent practices like sati. The Brahmo Samaj embraced the pure idealist monism of the Upaniṣads. Roy was also conversant with Unitarian Universalism, which he admired for its simple monotheism. In 1875, another reformist religious association, the Arya Samaj, arose with a more robust antiimperialist bent, promising a return to the age of Vedic culture. The idea of “NeoVedānta” largely grew out of the philosophical and religious reformations begun by these groups. As antiBritish movements gained traction, many Indian intellectual elites continued looking to Classical Indian philosophy—particularly the idealism of Advaita Vedānta—for a distinctly Indian national identity with global
48 philosophical relevance. Public figures like Rabindranath Tagore (18611941) and Mohandas K. Gandhi (18681948) were also engaged in modernizing Indian philosophy, using insights from the West for anticolonial purposes. Aurobindo was born into the midst of this movement in 1872. Aurobindo’s parents had connections to the Brahmo Samaj and the Youth Bengal Movement. His anglophile father sent him and his brothers to study in England at a young age, and Aurobindo went to study at Cambridge before returning to India. After several years as an anticolonial revolutionary and journalist, he was jailed for a year when some of his compatriots were involved in an assassination attempt. His revelations while imprisoned convinced him to pursue a life of spiritual practice, and he spent the remainder of his life—the majority of it in isolation—devoting his intellect to his philosophical, political, spiritual, and scriptural commentaries. He published these in his journal, Arya, the object of which, he claimed, was to “feel out for the thought of the future.”93 Arya was eventually published as many books, including Savitri, The Synthesis of Yoga, The Human Cycle, the Ideal of Human Unity, and The Life Divine. Many Indian thinkers, including Aurobindo, anticipated Said’s argument that English stereotypes about Eastern philosophy, religion, and culture were deployed to legitimate English rule. Like the German Orientalists, Aurobindo looks to the Vedic period as a golden age, but he dismisses the image of an India constructed by the European imagination: European writers, struck by the general metaphysical bent of the Indian mind […] are inclined to write as if this were all the Indian spirit. An abstract, metaphysical, religious mind overpowered by the sense of the infinite, not apt for life, dreamy, 93 Quoted in Sachidananda Mohanty, Sri Aurobindo: A Contemporary Reader (New Delhi:
Routledge, 2008), 15.
49 unpractical, turning away from life and action as Maya, this, they said, is India; and for a time Indians in this as in other matters submissively echoed their new Western teachers and masters.94
To counter this stereotype, Aurobindo emphasizes instead that the overflowing of variety in Indian thought is its natural state: that it is not merely idealistic and life denying, but “her inexhaustible power of life and joy of life,” and her “unimaginably prolific creativeness.”95 He presents an alternate vision of India’s Golden Age than that of the Orientalists by insisting that the true origins of the Indian spirit are life affirming. Chapter three will show that this preoccupation defined his metaphysical and ethical philosophy as well as his political philosophy. In the debate over the essence of Indian culture, philosophy in particular became an important battleground. K. C. Bhattacharyya (18751949), for instance, also argues that English cultural hegemony asserts itself through English education to produce a form of intellectual slavery at once more invisible and more insidious than overt political oppression, and that it would take courage and creativity to approach philosophy from a distinctly Indian perspective. “Under the present system,” he writes, “we generally receive western culture in the first instance and then we sometimes try to peer into our ancient culture as a curiosity and with the attitude of foreign oriental scholars…. When [Indians] seek to know, they do not feel, as they ought to feel, that they are discovering their own self.”96
94 Aurobindo, The Renaissance in India, 5–6. 95 Ibid., 7. 96 K. C. Bhattacharyya, “Svaraj in Ideas (1928),” in Indian Philosophy in English: From
Renaissance to Independence, ed. Nalini Bhushan and Jay L. Garfield (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2011), 104.
50 Bhattacharyya’s insight could describe Aurobindo’s own early life. When he arrived in Baroda in 1893, he reported encountering his “own self,” and felt a “natural attraction to Indian culture and ways of life and a temperamental feeling and preference for all that was Indian.”97 Despite his Cambridge training, Aurobindo grounds his philosophy in Indian scripture and tradition. His vision of resistance, though conceived as a violent uprising, included a spiritual and intellectual revolution in which indigenous creative agency would overcome Western thought. He does not ignore the West, but hopes to assimilate it on Indian terms. Aurobindo anticipates Bhattacharyya’s call for an active revaluation of Western culture and philosophy, advocating a process of new creation in which the spiritual power of the Indian mind remains supreme, recovers its truths, accepts whatever it finds sound or true, useful or inevitable of the modern idea and form, but so transmutes and Indianises it, so absorbs and so transforms it entirely into itself that its foreign character disappears and it becomes another harmonious element in the characteristic working of the ancient goddess, the Shakti of India mastering and taking possession of the modern influence, no longer possessed or overcome by it.98
Aurobindo argues that assimilation of Western thought—if controlled by the agency of Indian nationals and guided by the “spiritual essence” of India—could be executed as a nationalistic project. An integrative strategy reverses the colonial vector of knowledge as moving from the European center towards the colonial periphery by identifying the colonized nation as a hub of new knowledge production that emanates outwards. Vivekananda, in particular, became an
97 Quoted in Peter Heehs, The Lives of Sri Aurobindo (New York, NY: Columbia University
Press, 2008), 36. 98 Aurobindo, The Renaissance in India, 17.
51 influential missionary to the west.99 The argument that India could and would educate the West (as opposed to being a passive object of study) was incorporated into Indian nationalist rhetoric. Aurobindo imagined that the outgrowth of this project of incorporation would be “…no mere Asiatic modification of Western modernism, but some great, new and original thing of the first importance to the future of human civilization.”100 Aurobindo would go on to create the kind of anticolonial, hybridizing philosophy he espouses in this 1918 essay, and many other important Indian philosophers would follow this model. Though philosophy during the Indian Renaissance was fraught with questions of authenticity, class, and language, many Indian philosophers incorporated Western philosophies to their own ends, often in service of ancient Indian philosophical traditions, and often as part of a movement of nationalism and resistance. Aurobindo’s thought is critical to this project of modernizing Indian philosophy. Many others took up this approach, and ultimately assimilated the modernizing revaluations of Advaita Vedānta that Aurobindo produced. 101 This surge in the popularity of Advaita was felt in the West, and figured prominently in Western conceptions of Indian thought in the late 20th Century, in no small part because of Vivekananda’s outreach.102 Tagore and Gandhi joined
99 Elizabeth De Michelis, A History of Modern Yoga: Patañjali and Western Esotericism, First
paperback edition (New York: Continuum, 2005). 100 Aurobindo, “The Renaissance in India (1918),” in Indian Philosophy in English: From Renaissance to Independence, ed. Nalini Bhushan and Jay L. Garfield (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2011), 50. 101 Though Bhattacharyya claims in “Svaraj in Ideas” that “in philosophy hardly anything that has been written by a modern educated Indian shows that he has achieved a synthesis of Indian thought with western thought,” this critical, synthesizing work was being done, and Aurobindo was one of its chief architects. 102 De Michelis, A History of Modern Yoga: Patañjali and Western Esotericism.
52 Vivekananda and Aurobindo as the nonacademic figures most influential on academic philosophy during the colonial period. It was Vivekananda and Aurobindo, however, whose popularization of Advaita Vedānta was most felt in the academies of colonial India. Nalini Bhushan and Jay L. Garfield write: Our research has revealed that many of the major academic philosophers of the preindependence period, despite their carefully cultivated public secularism, made regular trips to consult with Sri Aurobindo Ghosh, the great exponent of Advaita Vedānta in the early decades of the 20th century, at his ashram in Pondicherry. We don’t know what they discussed, and it is possible that the pilgrimages were purely personal, private religious affairs. But there is reason to think that they were more than that.103 Aurobindo’s ashram was a hub of serious philosophical exchange. His revaluation of the doctrine of māyāvāda in traditional Vedānta in favor of a metaphysical conception of Brahman with līlāvāda stuck. “It is significant,” continue Bhushan and Garfield, that when we examine the way Advaita Vedanta was advanced by such philosophers as Malkani, Nikam, Hiriyanna, Mukerji, and Indrasen, we see that all adopt an approach that fits much more comfortably with the Līlāvāda rather than the Māyāvāda perspective.104 To suggest a shift from māyāvāda to līlāvāda, as I will show in chapter three, is to reject a Western orientalist view of Indian philosophy as lifedenying and illusionist, and turn instead towards a more modern, more universal, more affirmative Indian identity. Aurobindo’s role specifically in the philosophical arguments made during the Indian Renaissance was politically motivated. 103 Nalini Bhushan and Jay L. Garfield, “Pandits and Professors: The Renaissance of Secular
India,” in Indian Philosophy in English: From Renaissance to Independence (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2011), 15–16. 104 Ibid., 14.
53 Aurobindo’s philosophy was inextricable from an anticolonial project. Philosophers, religious scholars, and even devotees are quick to gloss over Aurobindo’s life as a political radical, implying that revolutionary life fell away completely once he experienced a spiritual revelation prison and devoted himself to a spiritual path. 105 Phillips, for instance, warns that “interpreters should not forget that Aurobindo writes first and foremost as a master yogin; he withdrew from politics and was rarely seen for the final two or three decades of his life in the interests, as he tells us, of his own spiritual askesis.”106 This is an oversimplification. I agree with T. Organ, who writes that Aurobindo …remained a revolutionary in politics and that he moved into yoga because he had concluded that a changed humanity is the necessary preliminary of a changed society…this elevation of consciousness was to accomplish the same ends for which he had previously thrown bombs. The British were not altogether misguided in having the police shadow the ashram during the first twentyeight years of its existence.107
Aurobindo’s explicit intention was not to reach out to or educate the West, but he was constantly aware of his relation to the West and its ideologies, which he both criticized and incorporated philosophically, an orientation he exhibits early in his intellectual life. Heehs draws attention to this extract from Aurobindo’s journals, recorded during his days as a 105 The importance of Aurobindo’s role in the Extremist party and India’s nationalist
movement can hardly be overstated. At various points, his lawn was flooded with thousands of admirers hoping for a glimpse of the nationalist leader. His revolutionary writing in Jugatar and Bande Mataram profoundly influenced the budding anticolonial movement. In almost every respect, Aurobindo was a pivotal figure in the vanguard of the anticolonial movement. 106 Stephen H. Phillips, “Purposeful Play,” Philosophy East and West 63, no. 4 (2013): 651. 107 Troy W. Organ, “REVIEW: The Essential Aurobindo by Robert A. McDermott; Six Pillars: Introductions to the Major Works of Sri Aurobindo by Robert A. McDermott; Sri Aurobindo,” Philosophy East and West 26, no. 3 (1976): 354.
54 student at Cambridge: There are signs that if Hinduism is to last and we are not to plunge into the vortex of scientific atheism and the breakdown of moral ideals which is engulfing Europe, it must survive as the religion for which Vedanta, Sankhya, & Yoga combined to lay the foundations, which Srikrishna announced & which Vyasa formulated…. I do not refer to the ignorant & customary Hinduism of today...but the purer form [of Vedanta] which under the pressure of Science is now reasserting its empire over the Hindu mind.108 This statement, according to Heehs, “is one of the first signs that Aurobindo had developed an interest in the religion of his ancestors.”109 This passage indicates that at its germination, Aurobindo's explorations of Indian philosophy were conceived in the pressure cooker of Western scientific thought, and a strong belief in the idea of renaissance. While preparing for the Indian Civil Service at Cambridge, Aurobindo studied classical philology and English Romantic literature. A study of the Cambridge Classics examinations from 1882—the year Aurobindo passed them, taking first in his class—reveals that his knowledge of Greek, Latin, and Classical History was excellent.110 He also educated himself extensively beyond the academy. Peter Heehs points out that: Aurobindo's reading at Cambridge went far beyond the confines of his classical and ICS courses. Fluent in four languages and proficient in three or four others, he ranged over the whole of Western literature: Homer, Aeschylus, Catullus, Virgil, Dante, Racine, Shakespeare, Milton. He also read some Greek philosophers, notably Plato and Epictetus. Years later he still considered two of the Platonic dialogues he read at Cambridge, the Republic and the Symposium, to be among humanity's 'highest points of thought and literature.'”111
108 Quoted in Heehs, The Lives of Sri Aurobindo, 57. 109 Ibid. 110 Cambridge University Department of Classics, “Cambrige University Exam in Classics”
(Cambridge University, 1882). 111 Heehs, The Lives of Sri Aurobindo, 24.
55 Although German Idealism surrounded him at Cambridge, Aurobindo’s reading of German philosophy seems to have been fairly limited. Heehs writes that Aurobindo was not taken with Kant or Hegel: Aurobindo did not share in the general enthusiasm. He once 'read, not Hegel, but a small book on Hegel, but it left no impression' on him. He also 'tried once a translation of Kant but dropped it after the first two pages and never tried again.'”112 Despite his claim that Hegel left no impression, Aurobindo’s reading about Hegel leaves traces in his philosophical thought. Stephen Phillips takes “Hegel or the concept of the Infinite” among other Western sources to be “more important influences on Aurobindo, I believe, than Indian philosophy—as distinct from what Aurobindo sees as Indian mystic works.”113 Aurobindo’s knowledge of Hegel would have been mediated through the British NeoHegelians Bradley and Caird in the works of the Indian neoHegelian, Hiralal Haldar, who Aurobindo would probably have read. He is also aware of the basic tenets of Kant’s ethical philosophy, engaging the concept of his categorical imperative in The Human Cycle and elsewhere.114 During his life at his ashram in Pondicherry, Aurobindo continued to read widely in Western literature, despite the fact that he had primarily turned his attention to Śaṅkara, the Vedas, and the Upaniṣads. He seems to have kept up with popular Indian philosophical journals, which dealt with both Indian and Western material.115 During this period, he read R.
112 Ibid. Heehs points out on that Bertrand Russell attended Trinity College at Cambridge while
Aurobindo was there, and that Russell was enamored of Hegel during that period. 113 Phillips, Aurobindo’s Philosophy of Brahman, 64. 114 Aurobindo, The Human Cycle and the Ideal of Human Unity, The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo 25 (Pondicherry, India: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust, 1997), 151. 115 Peter Heehs, Correspondence, April 26, 2015.
56 D. Ranade’s (18861957) Survey of PreSocratic Philosophy and his Constructive Survey of Upaniṣadic Philosophy.116 A reading of Ranade’s essay “Herakleitos” beside Aurobindo’s Heraclitus—to which this study will return—shows that Aurobindo read Ranade very closely.117 Nietzsche certainly influenced Aurobindo, but the extent of Aurobindo’s reading of Nietzsche is not known. Though Aurobindo could read German, he seems to have read primarily read English translations of Nietzsche.118 In an essay titled “The Divine Superman,” he explicitly compares Nietzsche’s conception of the Übermensch against his own. He also considers Nietzsche in essays titled “Beyond Good and Evil,” which of course echoes the title of Nietzsche’s major work and concept, and “the Eternal Return.” References to Nietzsche pepper his various works, including The Life Divine, where he criticizes “supermanhood of a Nietzschean type” as “a reversion to an old strenuous barbarism” though, as was customary, Aurobindo did not cite his sources.119 Some of his references are direct, as in “Jñana,” where he writes “Nietzsche saw the superman as the lionsoul passing out of camelhood, but the true heraldic device & token of the superman is the lion seated upon the camel which stands upon the cow of plenty.”120 Others are more oblique. For instance, Heehs points out that the lyrical style in Aurobindo’s list of aphorisms, “Thoughts and Glimpses,” appear to “owe much to 116 R. D. Ranade, Survey of PreSocratic Philosophy (Oriental Book Agency, n.d.); R. D.
Ranade, A Constructive Survey of Upaniṣadic Philosophy (Poona: Oriental Book Agency, 1926). 117 R. D. Ranade, “Herakleitos,” in Philosophical & Other Essays Part I (Jamkhandi: Shri Gurudeo Ranade Satkar Samiti, 1956), 1–23; Aurobindo, Heraclitus (Calcutta: Arya Pub. House, 1947). In his own version of this essay, Aurobindo responds to Ranade point by point, and elaborates on themes Ranade introduced, including the relation of Nietzsche to Heraclitus. 118 Heehs, The Lives of Sri Aurobindo, 43. 119 Aurobindo, The Life Divine, 1105. 120 Aurobindo, Essays Divine and Human: Writings from Manuscripts 19101950, 439.
57 Nietzsche in form.”121 According to Heehs, we can only be certain that Aurobindo read Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra. It may be that much of his reading of Nietzsche was gleaned from the Indian intellectual journals he read throughout his life. Heehs points out that Aurobindo references Nietzsche primarily in his writings from 19131914, before which Nietzsche was not well known in the Anglophone world.122 His reading of Thus Spoke Zarathustra was clearly influential, and may even have inspired a similar project in the form of Aurobindo’s Savitri, another epic work of philosophical poetry that follows a hero through a mythic journey. 123 The earliest manuscript of Savitri is dated 1916, indicating that he wrote the bulk of it during the period of his most comprehensive encounter with Nietzsche’s thought. Scholarly opinion varies in respect to how important Nietzsche’s influence may have been. Paul Mirabile acknowledges that Aurobindo appropriated concepts from Nietzsche: It is quite evident that Aurobindo ‘skimmed through’ Nietzsche’s works or relied more on crass biased commentaries which were published at that time in England. Be that as it may, in spite of the German’s ‘egoism’ ‘military credos’, ‘personalism’ and ‘pitiless’ [sic] Aurobindo does not deprive himself of Nietzsche’s philosophical concepts whose formulae he did not invent but whose figures as a way of life he did give birth to: ‘man must be surpassed’, ‘superman’, ‘the evolution of man’, ‘man as a transitional being’.124 Others, such as Robert Hemsell, argue, “It is unquestionable that Sri Aurobindo’s creative
121 Heehs, The Lives of Sri Aurobindo, 278. 122 Heehs, Correspondence. 123 Aurobindo, Savitri, The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo 3334 (Pondicherry, India: Sri
Aurobindo Ashram Trust, 1997). 124 Mirabile, “Nietzsche and Aurobindo ‘Le Ressentiment.’”
58 thought, like Heidegger’s, was directly influenced by Nietzsche.”125 Aurobindo’s assessment of Nietzsche was mixed. He does criticize Nietzsche, and some scholars believe his criticism goes too far. Paul Mirabile, for instance, defends Nietzsche against “Aurobindo’s unwarranted and unfounded aggressivity towards Nietzsche.” Regardless, Aurobindo’s response to Nietzsche was largely positive. He considered him “the most vivid, concrete and suggestive of modern thinkers,” even though he found his philosophy “in the end unsatisfactory.”126 Aurobindo credits Nietzsche above all other Western thinkers with heralding a renaissance of intuitive, divine thinking in Europe, noting, “It is the great distinction of Nietzsche among other European thinkers to have brought back something of the old dynamism and practical force in philosophy.”127 As we will see, Aurobindo sees Nietzsche as a true disciple of Heraclitus, appreciates his theory of becoming, and approvingly regards the “Will to Power as the root and law of life to the new pluralistic and pragmatic philosophy” in the West.128 Aurobindo takes issue with Nietzsche on several points. He criticizes Nietzsche explicitly in his book Heraclitus (1947), for his rejection of “being,” likening Nietzsche to the nihilists and Buddhists who reject all unifying principles. Metaphysics aside, most of Aurobindo’s unease with Nietzsche is ethical and political. He is disturbed by Nietzsche’s aristocratic, individualistic approach to politics, and reproaches him for promoting the power of the individual over the power of the people. He interprets Nietzsche’s “Superman” as a
125 Rod Hemsell, Sri Aurobindo and the Logic of the Infinite: Essays for the New Milennium
(Auroville: Auro eBooks, 2014), 11. 126 Aurobindo, Heraclitus, 15. 127 Ibid., 45–46. 128 Aurobindo, The Human Cycle and the Ideal of Human Unity, 30.
59 glorified individual meant to dominate others. Still, he seems to believe that Nietzsche, like himself, is channeling the Supermind: that the divine consciousness was trying to speak through him. Aurobindo colorfully refers to Nietzsche as “the mystic of Willworship, the troubled, profound, halfluminous Hellenising Slav with his strange clarities, his violent halfideas, his rare gleaming intuitions that came marked with the stamp of an absolute truth and sovereignty of light.” Aurobindo qualifies this backhanded praise, however. He goes on: But Nietzsche was an apostle who never entirely understood his own message. […] Not always indeed; for sometimes he rose beyond his personal temperament and individual mind, his European inheritance and environment […] and spoke out the Word as he had heard it, the Truth as he had seen it, bare, luminous, impersonal and therefore flawless and imperishable. But for the most part this message that had come to his inner hearing vibrating out of a distant Infinite like a strain caught from the lyre of faroff Gods, did get, in his effort to appropriate and make it nearer to him, mixed up with a somewhat turbulent surge of collateral ideas that drowned much of the pure original note.129 We can see from this amusing passage that Aurobindo’s Nietzsche possesses something of the same “Truth” he himself possesses, but Nietzsche’s understanding has been polluted by “his European inheritance.” Taking into context Aurobindo’s discussions of Europe from The Human Cycle, we can understand this to mean that Nietzsche was corrupted by the individualism and dominatinginstinct that characterized Europe’s modernity. As is the case with Nietzsche’s reading of Indian philosophy—mediated though the readings of others—Aurobindo received his education in Nietzschean thought primarily through essays in Indian philosophy journals, and so his interpretations were fairly consistent 129 Aurobindo, Essays in Philosophy and Yoga, The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo 13
(Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust, 1998), 151–152.
60 with those of his contemporaries, and, fittingly, sometimes offtarget. Nonetheless, Aurobindo treats Nietzsche carefully, looking beyond Nietzsche’s own claims about his intentions to analyze the deeper implications of his arguments and his readings are often sound. Aurobindo’s assessment of Nietzsche is bound up with his assessment of Germany. He admires German Romanticism, which in his day was developed, of course, through a preoccupation with Indian traditions. He imagines that Germany progressed towards higher levels of consciousness “due to […] her great philosophers, Kant, Hegel, Fichte, Nietzsche, from her great thinker and poet Goethe, from her great musicians, Beethoven and Wagner, and from all in the German soul and temperament which they represented.”130 He also credits Schopenhauer for Germany’s subjective revolution: “in Schopenhauer and Nietzsche as in Wagner it developed the intuitive vision and led to a deep change in European thinking.”131 Aurobindo’s Germany shifted towards intuition. He writes that these changes— were an attempt to read profoundly and live by the LifeSoul of the universe and tended to be deeply psychological and subjective in their method. From behind them, arising in the void created by the discrediting of the old rationalistic intellectualism, there had begun to arise a new Intuitionalism, not yet clearly aware of its own drive and nature, which seeks through the forms and powers of Life for that which is behind Life and sometimes even lays as yet uncertain hands on the sealed doors of the Spirit.132 Aurobindo apparently approved of intellectual movements he believed were working in harmony with brahman. German “Intuitionalism,” as exemplified in Nietzsche’s philosophy, allowed for Germany’s intellectuals to open to Divine evolution. He considered the Will to 130 Aurobindo, The Human Cycle and the Ideal of Human Unity, 41. 131
Aurobindo, Early Cultural Writings, The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo 1 (Pondicherry, India: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust, 2003), 629. 132 Aurobindo, The Human Cycle and the Ideal of Human Unity, 30.
61 Power theory in particular as a herald of this new age of intuition.133 Aurobindo’s critique of Nietzsche’s homeland also mirrors his evaluation of Nietzsche himself. Much as he describes Nietzsche as an intuitive mystic who failed ultimately to escape from his own Western predispositions towards individualism, overrationalization, and oppression, he argues that Germany was unable to fulfill its promise for the same reasons. Germany’s great thinkers, who aimed towards transcending the alltoohuman, were misunderstood by their compatriots because “there was no pure transmission from the subjective mind of the thinkers and singers to the objective mind of the scholars and organisers.”134 These organizers obsessively arranged the apparent world, and ended up appropriating elements of the new upsurge of lifeaffirming thought to the end of dominance and war. He considers their abuse of Nietzsche’s work specifically, going on to explain that “the misapplication by Treitschke of the teaching of Nietzsche to national and international uses which would have profoundly disgusted the philosopher himself, is an example of this obscure transmission.”135 Aurobindo and Nietzsche each respond to philosophical challenges inspired by modernity as they play out in their respective intellectual milieus. Motivated by pressure to naturalize metaphysics and respond to modern societal problems by gesturing towards the past and advocating a future “reawakening,” each philosopher took on the task of reforming his philosophical tradition in order to affirm the projects of ordinary life in the empirical world in the face of idealism. We have seen each responds to these problems with the
133 Aurobindo, Heraclitus, 15. 134 Aurobindo, The Human Cycle and the Ideal of Human Unity, 41. 135 Ibid.
62 knowledge of one another’s traditions. Their parallel philosophical arguments for an affirmative approach to empirical reality, reviewed over the following two chapters, do not play out only in a distant world of ideas. They are meant to address particular challenges in their respective historic moments. These ideas were meant to interact with human life and to change the course of history. With this context in mind, we can better understand what motivates Nietzsche’s use of the Will to Power as a lifeaffirming theory. His argument, to which we will now turn, does not unfold in a philosophical vacuum. Nietzsche actually argues with an intellectual milieu that turns away from the present towards an imagined beyond. In doing so, he dissents both against Indian traditions—as he understands them—and German Idealism as mediated through Schopenhauer. He considers his culture decadent, and hopes for a renaissance inspired by Classical thought. He struggles to naturalize his philosophical system in accordance with evolutionary accounts of existence. As we will see, these culturally specific drives play out in a philosophical argument that existence is a metaphysically real, constantly becoming flux of forces described as the Will to Power, and that human beings should embrace life and strive to overcome the limitations of our species.
63
Chapter 2: Nietzsche’s Will to Power
And do you know what this world is to me? Shall I show it to you in my mirror? This world: a monster of energy, without beginning, without end; a firm, iron magnitude of force that does not grow bigger or smaller […] at the same time one and many, increasing here and at the same time decreasing there; a sea of forces flowing and rushing together, eternally changing, eternally flooding back, with tremendous years of recurrence, with an ebb and a flood of its forms; out of the simplest forms striving toward the most complex, out of the stillest, most rigid, coldest forms toward the hottest, most turbulent, most selfcontradictory, and then again returning home to the simple out of this abundance, out of the play of contradictions back to the joy of concord, still affirming itself in this uniformity of its courses and its years, blessing itself as that which must return eternally, as a becoming that knows no satiety, no disgust, no weariness: this, my Dionysian world of the eternally selfcreating, the eternally selfdestroying, this mystery world of the twofold voluptuous delight, my "beyond good and evil," […] —do you want a name for this world? A solution for all its riddles? A light for you, too, you bestconcealed, strongest, most intrepid, most midnightly men? This world is the will to powerand nothing besides! And you yourselves are also this will to powerand nothing besides! Nietzsche, The Will to Power136
Rejecting idealism and deontology, Nietzsche proposes a new metaphysical 136 Nietzsche, WP 4:1067
64 interpretation of the world that grounds his ethical thought: The Will to Power. This constructive imagining—meant to replace all prior metaphysical speculation—is at the heart of Nietzsche’s philosophical system. His commitment to it grows increasingly clear in the writings approaching the climax of his intellectual career. Lifeaffirmation has both a metaphysical and an ethical application for Nietzsche. In the metaphysical sense, Nietzsche “affirms” that the world is as it appears rather than asserting that the true world is an ideal beyond. For Nietzsche, nothing about this life can be forsaken for a nonexistent transcendent realm. In the ethical sense, affirmation entails embracing the instincts and passions, and emulating the movements of the Will to Power by engaging in a constant process of selfovercoming.
1. Situating the Will to Power Focusing on Nietzsche’s theory of the Will to Power is methodologically treacherous. Doing so requires close engagement with one of his most controversial books, The Will to Power. Though he did not consider it fit for publication, his sister, Elizabeth Foster Nietzsche, edited it, to potentially deleterious effect, aand published it. Nevertheless, reflection on the Will to Power is to be found in the work from this period, including Twilight of the Idols and The Antichrist, texts that Nietzsche did prepare for publication. These texts reflect Nietzsche’s most mature and fully developed thought. His main preoccupations in his later years—lifeaffirmation and the Will to Power among them—represent the culmination of ideas anticipated even in early works, and it is from these texts that I will principally draw. To understand Nietzsche’s view of the Will to Power, we must understand its ancestry
65 in Schopenhauer’s view of the Will to Live. Schopenhauer was the most important Western philosopher of the “Will” before Nietzsche. Although Nietzsche ultimately rejects Schopenhauer’s pessimistic valuation of the Will, he remains indebted to Schopenhauer’s original idea of the Will as the basic force driving existence. Robert Cowan argues that Nietzsche’s engagement with Schopenhauer’s metaphysical Will reveals his indebtedness to the German Oriental Renaissance: Due largely to the influence of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche would never really be able to establish a non metaphysical philosophy, for his thinking would always characterize itself as a negation of metaphysics. One thus finds in Nietzsche a set of concerns that is indebted and related to those of the IndoGermans, but is a reversal of them.137 Schopenhauer’s work—so resonant with Vedānta philosophy—connects Nietzsche’s philosophy to Indian thought. Schopenhauer’s study of Plato, Kant, and the Upaniṣads led him to the conviction that behind the representation of the world is the thinginitself, which he argued is simply Will. The Will is a mindless, blind drive. He distinguished between the principle of the Will and the phenomenal world of representation with which human beings interact. From an ordinary perspective, humans see only the representation of the Will. From an absolute perspective, however, there is no distinction between the Will and its Representation. The notion of māyā, to which Schopenhauer appeals explicitly, defines the relationship of Representation to Will. Representation is to Śaṅkara’s illusory māyā as Will is to Brahman. Representation, that is, is
137 Robert Bruce Cowan, “Nietzsche’s Inability to Escape from Schopenhauer’s South Asian
Sources,” in The IndoGerman Identification: Reconciling South Asian Origins and European Destinies 17651885, Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture (Rochester, New York: Camden House, 2010), 163.
66 an illusion that masks the underlying reality of the Will. Early in The World as Will as Representation, Schopenhauer makes an explicit connection between Indian philosophy and his own, comparing his own work to the ancient wisdom of the Indians [which] declares that ‘it is māyā, the veil of deception, which covers the eyes of mortals, and causes them to see a world of which one cannot say either that it is or that it is not; for it is like a dream, like the sunshine on the sand which the traveller from a distance takes to be water, or like a piece of rope on the ground which he regards as a snake.’138
Schopenhauer argues that the Will is the only fundamentally real entity, and that there is no reality beyond the Will. What appears to us as a representation is actually the Will. His philosophical system hence mirrors the māyāvāda strain of Advaita Vedānta. Cowan points out that “Schopenhauer’s Absolute bears a much greater resemblance to Brahman than to any ‘absolute’ found in German idealism.”139 The Will, according to Schopenhauer, is a blind force that surges towards the continuation of life with no regard for the objects and beings through which it moves. It creates and destroys indifferently, even crudely, in fulfilling its endless desire to perpetuate life. Schopenhauer distinguishes between the individual will—the human volition—and the fundamental Will, which are related to one another in a way analogous to that of ātman and brahman. Ātman acts as an individual soul, but actually is Brahman, the one real soul. As in Vedāntic thought, the goal of human life in Schopenhauer's schema is to destroy the individual will by uniting it with the ultimate Will. Following Buddhist thought, Schopenhauer understands life as suffering. For him, life
138 Schopenhauer, WWR 1:78 139 Cowan, “Nietzsche’s Inability to Escape from Schopenhauer’s South Asian Sources.”
67 is not only suffering because it is characterized by relentless desire, but because life essentially consists of perpetual desire. Unlike Brahman, which is characterized by saccidānanda (being, consciousness, bliss), the Will to Live manifests as the pure force of desire without relief. Like many of the Indian ascetics Nietzsche denounces, Schopenhauer sees the denial, or negation, of the Will as the only hope for the alleviation of suffering. Art may allow humans temporary transcendence, because it provides a connection with the “ideal” to take respite from the whirl of suffering that makes up life, but Schopenhauer hopes in the end for “no will, no representation, no world.”140 Nietzsche’s critique of Schopenhauer rests on the issue of valuation—while he agrees that existence consists of a Will of sorts, he disagrees with Schopenhauer’s pessimism: with his hatred for the Will and for life. Peculiarly, Nietzsche regards idealism primarily as an evaluative position: one adopted by the cowardly. Nietzsche argues, “The concept of the 'beyond', the 'true world', [was] invented to devalue the only world there is, to deprive our earthly reality of any goal, reason or task!”141 Here, he implies that cowardice towards action and disgust with life preceded and actually motivated metaphysical idealism. First, men despaired of life, then they imagined a perfect “beyond” to which they might escape. Consistent with his use of the term "idealism" in an ethical sense to connote pessimism, Nietzsche uses “realism" to connote approval of the empirical world. He announces, for instance, that “Goethe was a convinced realist: he said yes to everything related to him.”142 Nietzsche’s project of metaphysical affirmation—of deleting the “beyond” in favor of a
140 Schopenhauer, WWR 3:71 141 Nietzsche, EH ‘Destiny,’ 142 Nietzsche, TI ‘Skirmishes,’49
68 completely realist view—serves his project of ethical affirmation. Where those who would deny the value of human life might attempt to escape multiplicity and change into a perfect transcendental realm, he creates a metaphysical system that makes this escape impossible. For Nietzsche, metaphysical affirmation amounts to a commitment to realism. Nietzsche rejects the distinction between the ordinary world and the true world, and also the devaluation of the real world that distinction implies. While Schopenhauer says there is only one true world, but it appears to us as an illusory representation, Nietzsche retorts, indeed, there is only one true world, but it is the ordinary world of representation, exactly as we see it. Nietzsche also asserts that the Will to Live is not a sufficient explanatory principle, “for life is merely a special case of the will to power; it is quite arbitrary to assert that everything strives to enter into this form of the will to power.”143 He believes that the Will to Live fails in part because it can be reduced further: into the Will to Power. While a Will to Live can explain why the biological world is driven by reproduction of genetic material, the Will to Power, he argues, can explain not only that, but every other fact about the workings of existence. 2. Metaphysical Affirmation The doctrine of the Will to Power asserts that the world consists only of one complex, multivalent force that generates and consists of constant creation and destruction, and which constantly seeks to overcome. Nietzsche is an antimetaphysician, but he does not abandon metaphysics without reconstructing it. That would constitute “passive nihilism.” In Beyond
143 Nietzsche, WP 3:692
69 Good and Evil, Nietzsche affirms his commitment to the reality of the Will to Power as absolutely fundamental: Suppose, finally, we succeeded in explaining our entire instinctive life as the development and ramification of one basic form of the will—namely, of the will to power, as my proposition has it; suppose all organic functions could be traced back to this will to power and one could also find in it the solution of the problem of procreation and nourishment—it is one problem—then one would have gained the right to determine all efficient force univocally as—will to power. The world viewed from inside, the world defined and determined according to its ‘intelligible character’—it would be ‘will to power’ and nothing else.144
In the passage above, we see that our instincts are explained only as the “development” and “ramification” of the one force. “Life itself is will to power,” Nietzsche insists: “selfpreservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent results.”145 Nietzsche formulated his principle of the Will to Power against the projects of both mechanistic physicists and Darwinists, as he imagined them. The former, he thought, were too committed to stasis and therefore being: they dealt in “objects” composed of relatively static conglomerations of singular atoms. For instance, he contends that “The mechanistic world is imagined as only sight and touch imagine a world (as ‘moved’)—so as to be calculable—thus causal unities are invented, ‘things’ (atoms) …”146 The gaze of the physicist, that is, interprets a world of complexity and change as a world of simplicity and stasis in which things themselves are divorced from the mysterious forces that ‘move’ them.
144 Nietzsche, BGE 36 145 Nietzsche, BGE 13 146 Nietzsche, WP 3:636
70 Nietzsche reduces existence to forces, rather than to objects. While atoms are characterized by being, his “quanta” of Will to Power are characterized by becoming. These quanta are mere arrangements of force. Nietzsche considers the Will to Power a physical force of sorts, but it is a distinctly vital force governed by a blind intention. This vital, dynamic rendition of forces resists what he sees as the disinterested interplay of the laws of physics. He insists on the presence of desire inherent in this force: The victorious concept “force” by means of which our physicists have created God and the world, still needs to be completed: an inner will must be ascribed to it, which I designate as “will to power,” i.e., as an insatiable desire to manifest power; or as the employment and exercise of power, as a creative drive, etc.”147
Nietzsche argues that the mechanistic theory “gives the impression of meaninglessness.”148 The force of the Will to Power is, on the other hand, vitalistic and striving, though it is not conscious. The Will to Power is not a singular force, but a system of countless forces produced by the same drive to overcome: to become greater in size and power by mastering the self or others. Multiplicities arise from the constant reconfiguration of power dynamics the Will demands. It might appear that Nietzsche asserts that the world progresses by means of the destruction of the weak by the strong, but his picture is more nuanced: according to him there are no fixed qualities like “the weak” or “the strong,” nor are there fixed power relations. The world rearranges itself constantly as quanta of power relate to one another. This system is always unstable, because forces, quanta, and the beings they compose are constantly
147 Nietzsche, WP 3:619 148 Nietzsche, WP 3: 617
71 struggling to overcome one another. Their struggle, however, also produces temporarily unified bodies. Nietzsche explains that these bodies are formed by the need to consolidate power: My idea is that every specific body strives to become master over all space and to extend its force (its will to power) and to thrust back all that resists its extension. But it continually encounters similar efforts on the part of other bodies and ends by coming to an arrangement (‘union’) with those of them that are sufficiently related to it: thus they then conspire together for power. And the process goes on149
These power relations dissolve and reconfigure. Though Nietzsche does use dichotomizing terms for the relationships between these quanta, his resistance to ontological duality tempers the crispness of distinctions between powerful and powerless, since these relations are in constant temporal flux: Ordinary people think they see something rigid, complete and permanent; in truth, however, light and dark, bitter and sweet are attached to each other and interlocked at any given moment like wrestlers of whom sometimes one, sometimes the other is on top. […] This strife of opposites gives birth to all that becomes; the definite qualities which look permanent to us express the momentary ascendancy of one partner. But his by no means signifies the end of the war; the contest endures to all eternity.150
These constellations of power have neither physical nor temporal stasis at any point. The drive to overcome other beings drives constant change. Nietzsche is an antimetaphysician only insofar as he opposes metaphysics of being. Becoming, however, is fundamental to his interpretation of the world as an eternally shifting 149 Nietzsche, WP 3: 636 150 PTA 5
72 flux. His account concept of becoming derives from his reading of Heraclitus. (Heraclitus, of course, also attracted Aurobindo’s attention.) Much of Nietzsche’s thought on Greek philosophy comes to us through Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, which was unpublished in his lifetime. It was written, however, in the same period as The Birth of Tragedy (1872). Marianne Cowan describes the reception of Tragedy: The Birth of Tragedy presented a view of the Greeks so alien to the spirit of the time and to the ideals of its scholarship that it blighted Nietzsche's entire academic career. It provoked pamphlets and counterpamphlets attacking him on the grounds of common sense, scholarship and sanity. For a time Nietzsche, then professor of classical philology at the University of Basle, had no students in his field.151 Nietzsche’s philological scholarship was so unpopular in part because, though he echoes Goethe’s view of the importance of Greek thought to the development of modern Germany, he does not encourage unthinking emulation of Greek society; instead, he advocates its revaluation. He puts this intention in plain terms: “My aim is to generate open enmity between our contemporary ‘culture’ and antiquity. Whoever wishes to serve the former must hate the latter.”152 While he rejects the idealism of Socrates and Plato, however, Nietzsche approves of Heraclitus. He writes in a late text: With the greatest respect, I will make an exception for the name of Heraclitus. When all the other philosophical folk threw out the testimony of the senses because it showed multiplicity and change, Heraclitus threw it out because it made things look permanent and unified.153 Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks presents Nietzsche’s reconstruction of 151 Friedrich Nietzsche, “Introduction,” in Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, trans.
Marianne Cowan (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, Inc., 2001). 152 PTA 5 153 Nietzsche, TI Reason: 2
73 Heraclitus’ metaphysics of becoming. Christoph Cox points out that Heraclitus is treated as the hero of Greek philosophy and as a standin for Nietzsche himself. Cox puts it succinctly: “Nietzsche’s Heraclitus is an antidualist and antimetaphysician for whom there is only ‘one world,’ a world of ‘becoming’ that is entirely physical and evident to those who are not swayed by the conceptual and linguistic reification that convince the ‘shortsighted’ of being and persistence.”154 Nietzsche replicates Heraclitian imagery throughout his corpus, such as the child’s play, fire, and the “agon.” For instance, Nietzsche’s Will to Power, like Heraclitus’ agon, builds towers of sand like a child at the seashore, piling them up and trampling them down. From time to time it starts the game anew. A moment of satiety, and again it is seized by its need, as the artist is seized by the need to create. Not hybris but the evernewlyawakened impulse to play calls the new worlds into being.155
It seems that Heraclitus’ concept of the world as play may well have been inspiring for Nietzsche as he hunted for alternatives to Schopenhauerian idealism. In the following passage from Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, Nietzsche describes Heraclitus’ world as one in which becoming is manifested as constant play: In this world only play, play as artists and children engage in it, exhibits comingtobe and passing away, structuring and destroying, without any mora1 additive, in forever equal innocence. And as children and artists play, so plays the everliving fire. It constructs and destroys, all in innocence. Such is the game that the aeon plays with itself.156
154 Christoph Cox, Nietzsche: Naturalism and Interpretation (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1999), 188. 155 PTA 7 156 PTA 7
74 This description of a joyful world playing with itself is contrasts sharply with Schopenhauer’s world of māyā. As we will see in the next chapter, the language in this passage resonates with Aurobindo’s literary representations of līlā. Nietzsche inherits his own preoccupation with the tension between being and becoming” from the German Idealists. Nietzsche regards belief in “being” as one of the intellectual mistakes that allow many other mistakes (like faith in opposite values) to proliferate. He argues that real empirical examination of the world reveals nothing but a flux of becoming, and that being, therefore, is only an idea humans impose.157 For this reason, he rejects even atomic theory, which imagines static, durable, separable entities underlying existence. He writes that atoms “must be fictions, because observation of the world shows us that “there are no durable ultimate units, no atoms, no monads: here, too, "beings" are only introduced by us (from perspective grounds of practicality and utility).”158 Humans, he argues, struggle to function without discrete categories and a sense of stability—and this psychological weakness leads them to construct fictions in order to feel safe. The concept of being “accords with our inevitable need to preserve ourselves to posit a crude world of stability, of "things," etc.”159 Nietzsche sets himself against being not only
157 The idea of Being retained rhetorical significance for Nietzsche. He considers art, in its
attempt to replicate certain aspects in reality, as the effort to will Being. He puts it this way: “Art as the will to overcome becoming, as ‘eternalization’ but shortsighted, depending on the perspective: repeating in miniature, as it were, the tendency of the whole.” (WP 3:617) The desire to cling to a moment as it passes—to make it be—may be an expression of true lifeaffirmation for Nietzsche. 158 WP 3:715 159 Ibid. WP 3:715
75 because it is fiction, but also because this fiction has profound practical consequences.160 Believing that the “real” world of being is somewhere beyond the world of becoming, and that the world of being is the one that really matters, leads to world negation. It denies life—for life is no more than the ordinary world of becoming. This force of becoming actually functions, for Nietzsche, as art. Becoming is artistic creation constantly and simultaneously willed, wrought, and enjoyed. Nietzsche describes the world as “play as artists and children engage in it.”161 The world becomes not only according to the tensions between shifting power configurations, but simultaneously according to the joy the world produces in becoming. Though the Will to Power is not conscious and does not feel delight as a subject, it generates the feeling of delight through the constant overcoming of obstacles. Nietzsche uses the word “delight” quite specifically as a metonym for the play of power. He writes: “if pleasure is every increase of power, displeasure every feeling of not being able to resist or dominate […] Nonetheless: opposites, obstacles are needed; therefore, relatively, encroaching units.”162 The destruction of old forms and their replacement with new forms is a process that Nietzsche considers the ultimate aesthetic ecstasy. Nietzsche asserts that “Becoming does not aim at a final state” and that no final state could ever exist. He does, however (like Aurobindo, as we shall see) see an evolutionary pattern in which existence oscillates between simple repose and chaotic complexity: it struggles “out of the stillest, most rigid, coldest forms toward the hottest, most turbulent, most
160 After all, Nietzsche has nothing against fictions, per se. He sees the ideal project of human
life as a fundamentally interpretive project, in which we constantly manipulate lies and fictions as a kind of artistry. 161 PTA 7 162 Nietzsche, WP 3:693.
76 selfcontradictory, and then again returning home to the simple out of this abundance, out of the play of contradictions back to the joy of concord.” 163 On this view, the world becomes according to aesthetic principles; when it has achieved selfovercoming and simplicity, it is driven to generate more complexity: more multiplicity. By simplicity, Nietzsche does not mean a true stillness. That would be an admission of “Being.” There is no “space that might be ‘empty’ here or there” in his metaphysical system; there are only unceasing forces. 164 While the states in Nietzsche’s system may slow down, they are never still. While they may consolidate, they never completely unify. Rather, Nietzsche’s Will to Power is constantly reconfiguring in order that it might continue having different forms to strive towards. Human beings are also reduced to “becoming.” Nietzsche argues that humans do not possess egos that stand as detached observers—instead, we consist of a rapidly reorienting series of states dependent on passing swells of instincts and passions guided by the drive for power. Persons are ultimately processes, rather than immutable selves. When Nietzsche writes about the human need to deceive as “that continual urge and surge of a creative, formgiving, changeable force” in which “the spirit enjoys the multiplicity and craftiness of its masks,”165 he is relying on the root of “person” in the Latin “persona,” meaning a theatrical “mask.” Human beings are processes governed by the Will to Power: the personhood we invent is simply theatrical play. Nietzsche’s commitment to Becoming leads him to a radical deconstruction of the duality between the human self and the world. Nietzsche writes, “there is no ‘being’ behind
163 Nietzsche, WP 3:708; Nietzsche, WP 3:1067. 164 Ibid. 165 Ibid.
77 doing, effecting, becoming; ‘the doer’ is merely a fiction added to the deed.”166 He is able, then, to understand the self and the world as Will to Power: as part of the same process of becoming.167 He sees humanity as part of this evolution: when we act in accordance with the natural—when we act in joyful harmony with the spirit of the Will to Power—we move beyond the merely human.
3. Ethical Affirmation Nietzsche’s most radical call for affirmation lies in his doctrine of the eternal return. The concept, he says, came to him as an ecstatic revelation.168 The theory of the eternal return is best understood as a kind of thought experiment asking us to value the world under this condition: that every moment we spend on earth will be repeated.169 This repetition will occur not just once, but for eternity, and when it does, our brain states will, necessarily, be identical—we will feel just as we felt. In the Gay Science, Nietzsche puts the idea forward as
166 Nietzsche, GM 1:13 167 Nietzsche, somewhat strangely, does admit the existence of the soul, but he insists that it
has specific location in the body like any other organ. 168 Nietzsche, EH, ‘Books,’ Z 1. Nietzsche writes, “The fundamental conception of this work, the idea of the eternal recurrence, this highest formula of affirmation that is at all attainable, belongs in August 1881: it was penned on a sheet with the notation underneath, “6000 feet beyond man and time.” That day I was walking through the woods along the lake of Silvaplana; at a powerful pyramidal rock not far from Surlei I stopped. It was then that this idea came tome.” He refers to this moment as a “birth.” 169 The status of the eternal return in Nietzsche’s philosophical system has long been debated. As a cosmological claim, it seems untenable, or at least fanciful, yet Nietzsche seems to take it seriously. He even makes an attempt to use his metaphysics of becoming—insofar as the theory involves the conservation and endless reconfiguration of force—to account for the viability of the eternal return. I suspect that Nietzsche’s apparent commitment to the actual cosmological viability of the eternal return reflects the intensity of his revelatory experience, but also an overriding commitment to metaphysically grounding his evaluative claims.
78 a thought experiment, asking: What if some day or night a demon were to steal into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it you will have to live once again and innumerable times again; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unspeakably small or great in your life must return to you, all in the same succession and sequence – even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!170 On the hypothesis of the eternal return, he argues, we are forced to make a choice about how to value life, knowing that our choice will affect our own happiness again in the future. If this experiment were true—if there were no escape from the present moment now or forever—it would be unwise to adopt a negative attitude towards our experiences. To do so would infinitely increase our own misery. Nietzsche hopes to show by this thought experiment that the only wise response to an eternally recurring life would be to radically change our mode of valuation: to embrace and enjoy every moment of life as it comes and passes, thereby multiplying our own joy eternally. In this reality, it makes no sense to turn away from life, because life is inescapable. One could think of the eternal return as a new mythology meant to turn human attention back to earth. The god Dionysus rules over this mythos. Indeed, Nietzsche confirms that affirming the eternal return is the ultimate Dionysian act. That “someone […] who has thought 'the most abysmal thought', can nonetheless see it not as an objection to existence, not even to its eternal return, but instead find one more reason in it for himself to be the eternal
170 Nietzsche, GS 4:341
79 yes to all things […] this is the concept of Dionysus once more.”171 References to these two themes, which often overlap, occur more frequently in later works like Twilight of the Idols, Ecce Homo, The Antichrist, and The Will to Power. Nietzsche writes, “I, the last disciple of the philosopher Dionysus, I, the teacher of eternal return . . . ”172 Near the end of his career, he identifies himself as Dionysus: the last section of Ecce Homo reads, in its entirety, “ Have I been understood? Dionysus versus the crucified … ”173 For Nietzsche, Dionysus is the figure who affirms both the artistic creation and destruction involved in becoming. In 1888, he construes the Dionysian worldview this way: The word "Dionysian" means: an urge to unity, a reaching out beyond […] the abyss of transitoriness: a passionatepainful overflowing into darker, fuller, more floating states; an ecstatic affirmation of the total character of life as that which remains the same, just as powerful, just as blissful, through all change; the great pantheistic sharing of joy and sorrow that sanctifies and calls good even the most terrible and questionable qualities of life; the eternal will to procreation, to fruitfulness, to recurrence; the feeling of the necessary unity of creation and destruction.174 To achieve the Dionysian is precisely to achieve the most valiant extreme of affirmation: to affirm both pain and pleasure, to will the eternal destruction and rebirth of every moment, and, ultimately, to embody the Will to Power. Dionysus is, above all, an artist who embodies aesthetic ecstasy through creation and destruction. Dionysian valuation acts both as a model for individual thinking and as a metaphysical model of the world: as we have seen, the world of becoming is itself “Dionysian” in that it 171 Nietzsche, EH ‘books,’ 6 172 Nietzsche, TI ‘ancients,’ 5 173 In his last year—growing mad—Nietzsche wrote short, strange letters to friends signed
either “dionysus” or “the crucified.” 174 Nietzsche, WP 4:1050
80 plays out through the blind desire for greater power and joy, affirming “the total character of life […] through all change,” producing ecstasy in the glorious and the horrible equally, remaining “of equivalent value every moment.”175 Human beings must affirm the sexual creation and violent destruction of the world with Dionysian joy in order to “be oneself in the eternal joy of becoming”—because what we are is nothing more than “Life rejoicing over its own inexhaustibility even in the very sacrifice of its highest types.”176 Becoming is always a Dionysian phenomenon: an unconditional, ecstatic affirmation of each moment. Nihilism and asceticism are the enemies of Nietzsche’s affirmation. Nietzsche distinguishes an undesirable variant of nihilism from a desirable variant. He calls the former “Passive Nihilism” and the latter “Active Nihilism: A. Nihilism as a sign of increased power of the spirit: as active nihilism. B. Nihilism as decline and recession of the power of the spirit: as passive nihilism. It can be a sign of strength: the spirit may have grown so strong that previous goals (‘convictions’, articles of faith) have become incommensurate […] Or a sign of the lack of strength to posit for oneself, productively, a goal, why, a faith.177 Active nihilism, as we will see, is closely tied to affirmation and selfovercoming: it is the occupation of the true Dionysian thinker and creator. In this sense, nihilism is both an enemy and an ally of Nietzsche’s affirmation. Nietzsche associates Passive Nihilism with defeatism, weakness of will, and the inability to imagine higher types. This version is adopted by those who accept the 175 Nietzsche, WP 3:708 176 Nietzsche, TI ‘books,’ 5 177 Nietzsche, WP 1:2223
81 nonexistence of God, but interpret the wake of God’s Death as an endless void of meaning: they conclude that they have been living in an illusion.178 This desperation for guidance, combined with weakness of the will and inability to create meaning, results in A universal disvaluation: ‘Nothing has any meaning’—this melancholy sentence means ‘All meaning lies in intention, and if intention is altogether lacking, then meaning is altogether lacking, too.’ In accordance with this valuation, one was constrained to transfer the value of life to a ‘life after death,’ or to the progressive development of ideas or of mankind or of the people or beyond mankind…”179
The passive nihilist fails to understand what meaning actually is, and, most of all, what it could be. He is left only with devaluation. This “alltoohuman” nihilist moans, “for what?” and hangs his head—but “The nihilistic question ‘for what’ is rooted in the old habit of supposing that the goal must be put up, given, demanded from outside—by some superhuman authority.”180 Passive Nihilism is not a pathology limited to individuals. Nietzsche argues that it can overtake entire societies, and he argues that it was in danger of overtaking all of Europe. He identifies entire philosophies and religions as nihilistic: I saw the beginning of the end, the dead stop, a retrospective weariness, the will turning against life, the tender and sorrowful signs of the ultimate illness: I understood the ever spreading morality of pity that had seized even on philosophers and made them ill, as the most sinister symptom of a European culture that had itself become sinister, perhaps as its bypass to a new Buddhism? to a Buddhism for Europeans? to—nihilism?”181
178 Nietzsche, WP 1:12 179 Nietzsche, WP 3:666 180 Nietzsche, WP 1:29 181 Nietzsche, GM 3:5
82 Metaphysically, passive nihilism is the conviction that the world is simply empty of external meaning. Ethically, it involves the tendency to pity living things, and particularly to pity them for merely being alive. Psychologically, this variant of nihilism is a “symptom” of an “illness” that makes one “weary” and “sinister.” Nietzsche uses Buddhism as the clearest example of passive nihilism: in his view, it (metaphysically) negates the reality of the world, (ethically) pities living things for the suffering inherent in merely being alive, and (pathologically) turns “away from life” towards escapism. He equates “nihilistic withdrawal from [life], a desire for nothingness or a desire for its antithesis, for a different mode of being” with “Buddhism and the like.”182 Nietzsche detests pity, an unsavory value peculiar to passive nihilism. Schopenhauer, who advocates pity, comes under fire: Schopenhauer was right here: pity negates life, it makes life worthy of negation, pity is the practice of nihilism. Once more: this depressive and contagious instinct runs counter to the instincts that preserve and enhance the value of life: by multiplying misery just as much as by conserving everything miserable, pity is one of the main tools used to increase decadence pity wins people over to nothingness!”183
Pity is proof that passive nihilism has practical ill effects in the world: pitying people teaches them that their lives are not worth living—that the reality of life is to be evaded at all costs and escaped if possible. It enables others to become weaker, instead of empowering them to reach new strengths. We will see that active nihilism—or, affirmation—comes with opposite moral baggage: the obligation to empower others. This, Nietzsche contends, is a true gift.
182 Nietzsche, GM 3:4 183 Nietzsche, A 1:7
83 After spending years attacking nihilism, Nietzsche concedes in Will to Power that he himself is a nihilist after all, albeit a nihilist of a radically different kind: On the genesis of the nihilist.—it is only late that one musters the courage for what one really knows. That I have hitherto been a thoroughgoing nihilist, I have admitted to myself only recently: the energy and radicalism with which I advanced as a nihilist deceived me about this basic fact. 184 Active Nihilism’s “energy and radicalism” reflects power of the spirit. The strongwilled understand the advent of metaphysical nihilism not as a darkening of the world, but instead as a “new dawn” or a new “horizon.” The active nihilist revalues nihilism as a glorious new prospect. He sees the opportunity to create anew and to overcome the approaching unknown. These active nihilists are Nietzsche’s “free spirits”— Free spirits’ feel illuminated by a new dawn; our heart overflows with gratitude, amazement, forebodings, expectation – finally the horizon seems clear again, even if not bright; finally our ships may set out again, set out to face any danger; every daring of the lover of knowledge is allowed again; the sea, our sea, lies open again; maybe there has never been such an ‘open sea’.185 This metaphor shows that above all, a joyful attitude towards existence is the best, most Dionysian response to nihilism. Those prospects that make the weak most afraid—challenge, contradiction, illusion, and unknowability—embolden the free spirit. This strongwilled nihilist is so emboldened because of his eagerness to respond to the challenge by deconstructing and reconstructing meaning, knowing the task has fallen, now, on humanity alone. His tool is the “hammer,” used first to tap the “idols” to test for hollowness, and then to destroy them if necessary. The new dawn, or unknown futureworld, is understood as one in
184 Nietzsche, WP 1:25 185 Nietzsche GS 343
84 which this responsibility is comprehended. In this context, the active nihilist becomes what modern morality would call a liar: Our "new world": we have to realize to what degree we are the creators of our value feelings—and thus capable of projecting "meaning" into history. This faith in truth attains its ultimate conclusion in usyou know what it is: that if there is anything that is to be worshipped it is appearance that must be worshipped, that the lieand not the truthis divine! The active nihilist, then, commits to an activity. This activity involves embracing the fact that we deal so often with illusions and lies, and then “lying.” The active nihilist becomes an artist: he masters illusions through creating more of them, not dispelling them. This process first of all requires understanding the illusions involved in experience. He emphasizes this awareness as crucial to overcoming oneself and others through creation, claiming that “We who think and feel at the same time are those who really continually fashion something that had not been there before: the whole eternally growing world of valuations, colors, accents, perspectives, scales, affirmations, and negations.”186 Unlike Schopenhauer, who, like the Vedāntins, sees representation as illusion, and seeks to see the reality behind it, Nietzsche’s active nihilist embraces illusion as the only reality there is and the only one worth having. Nietzsche hence does not take life to be an illusion: it has no greater truth behind it. Like dreams, lives are ephemeral, shifting, and full of lies. Active nihilists embrace this. “Among all these dreamers, I too who ‘know,’ am dancing my dance; and that the knower is a means for prolonging the earthly dance and thus belongs to the masters of ceremony of existence.”187 Even though we may ‘know’ as he does
186 Nietzsche, GS 242 187 Nietzsche, GS 116
85 that our experience lacks independent reality and objectivity, we still must go on dreaming. Nietzsche sees this realization not as a route to pessimism, but as a step to liberation and as an opportunity for creativity. If all human reality is constructed, those nihilists who realize they can construct and deconstruct meaning are the more powerful. “Whatever has value in our world now does not have value in itself, according to its nature—nature is always valueless, but has been given value at some time, as a present—and it was we who gave and bestowed it. Only we [the creators] have created the world that concerns man!”188 Nietzsche hence sees the invention of fictions that imbue the world with fictive meaning as the ultimate Dionysian activity. Nietzsche criticizes ascetics, particularly Indian ascetics and “Brahmins” not specifically for being nihilistic, but for being pessimistic. If nihilism takes as its object the meaning of life itself, pessimism focuses on the way we value the life we have, given that we choose to keep on living it.189 It focuses not on existence as a whole, but on the experience of
188 Ibid., 242 189 Distinguishing Nietzsche’s uses of “nihilism” and “pessimism” can be difficult for many
reasons. For one, Nietzsche describes pessimism as the early stage of nihilism, and claims it should rightly be called nihilism (WP §9). Another is that pessimism constitutes only one of many species of worlddenial that so frequently overlap: i.e., the passive nihilist is also a pessimist. Pessimism can also lead to nihilism, when societal conditions producing sickness and weakness—values that favor the “herd mentality” of the miserable and revolts against the supposedly more Dionysian, more noble ideas of great men—generates values that are “denaturalized” in that they are detached from reality and working against the Will to Power. This tendency increases misery, because it discourages the pursuit of our most fundamental drives for power. Sexuality, for instance, is called foul. These naysaying values are oversimplified into “opposite values” (as Good and Evil, for instance) that repudiate the worth of the actual world. The elaboration of these essentializing, dichotomizing values (which proliferate in part out of laziness) leads to a circular, internally consistent but externally problematic system of valuation that is “detached and idealistic” and which, in order to uphold itself as it floats in the vacuum of ideas, turns “against action.” (WP 1:37)
86 life in particular. Pessimism is uninvolved in metaphysical speculation: it merely entails disgust for life and the feeling that it is useless and that there is no point proceeding. Nietzsche specifies that the pessimism is a response to life in a particular iteration: “modern pessimism is an expression of the uselessness of the modern world—not of the world of existence.”190 Where the pessimist gloomily confesses the badness of life and the nihilist denies its metaphysical value, the ascetic takes another step: he insists on actually divesting from life. He acts out passive nihilism. We can begin to see in the ascetic how the notion of morality is actually embedded in Nietzsche’s understanding of worldnegation. This connection is forged in the outset of Thus Spoke Zarathustra when Nietzsche’s hero has his first human encounter: he meets a wandering ascetic who has taken to living in the wilderness to commune with God. Seeing that Zarathustra is returning to the world of life and civilization, the ascetic, full of regret to see another truthseeker abandoning his task, responds: … As in the sea hast thou lived in solitude, and it hath borne thee up. Alas, wilt thou now go ashore? Alas, wilt thou again drag thy body thyself?” Zarathustra answered: “I love mankind.” “Why,” said the saint, “did I go into the forest and the desert? Was it not because I loved men far too well? Now I love God: men, I do not love. Man is a thing too imperfect for me. Love to man would be fatal to me. Zarathustra answered: “What spoke I of love! I am bringing gifts unto men.”191
A complex moral argument is embedded in Zarathustra’s exchange with the ascetic. We have seen that Nietzsche detests pity and the modern incarnation of human morality, but it seems 190 Nietzsche WP 1:34 191 Nietzsche, Z 1:1
87 clear here that pessimism—particularly in the form of asceticism—allows its adherents not only to deny the value of life, but also to deny their obligation to life. The ascetic who claims to love men “far too well” is flaunting his pity. Pessimists, counting the entire project of life as futile, shirk the duty to improve it by opening up new prospects. Active nihilism, in contrast, is a way to bring “gifts unto men” in the form of radical deconstruction of values. Nietzsche advocates the “bestowing virtue,” and holds free spirits to a standard of generosity, saying “Ye constrain all things to flow towards you and into you, so that they shall flow back again out of your fountain as the gifts of your love.”192 This bestowing virtue is attained through teaching the deconstruction of ethics by example. The active nihilist lives as though his life will return eternally. He refuses to accept transcendental authority. He flouts conventional values, and teaches that people can create values of their own. He shows that revaluation is a creative act. After he leaves the ascetic, Zarathustra enters civilization and announces the Death of God. Zarathustra’s proclamation to the citizens—which acknowledges the event of nihilism and opens up paths to both passive and active responses—is the gift of an invitation to a new horizon and a new dawn: the invitation to affirm life and bloom with new power. Understanding Nietzsche’s critique of the ascetic refusal to engage with life helps to
192 Nietzsche, Z, 1:1
88 illuminate the positive ethics of overcoming that accompany commitment to affirmation.193 This obligation to deconstruct, to overcome, and to usher others towards the dawn deserves careful treatment, and this necessity brings us to Nietzsche’s supraethics. The metaphysical theory of the Will to Power demands that morality be transcended, because conventional morality works in opposition to the Will to Power by breeding weakness.194 Nietzsche has Christian morality in mind here. He criticizes the character of its commandments—in the assertion that our moral obligations are the word of God, and so come down to us from the ideal “beyond.” The transcendent status of these ethical commandments is meant to prevent people from creating new values—and therefore, in Nietzsche’s view, to prevent them from fulfilling the most important function of human life. Nietzsche argues that Western secular
193 As with nihilism and pessimism, there is also a desirable variant of asceticism that is tied to
selfovercoming. In this sense, asceticism serves as the drive to challenge oneself and endure pain in order to become stronger. Nietzsche elaborates this thought in the Antichrist: “The most spiritual people, being the strongest, find their happiness where other people would find their downfall: in labyrinths, in harshness towards themselves and towards others, in trials; they take pleasure in selfovercoming: asceticism is their nature, requirement, instinct. They see difficult tasks as a privilege, they relax by playing with burdens that would crush other people . . . ” (A 57). 194 Nietzsche is aware of his affinity of his ethical thought to that of other traditions, if only crudely: ‘Good and evil,’ says the Buddhist—‘both are fetters: the Perfect One became master over both’; ‘what is done' and what is not done,’ says the believer of the Vedānta, ‘give him no pain; as a sage, he shakes good and evil from himself; no deed can harm his kingdom; he has gone beyond both good and evil’: this idea is common to all of India, Hindu and Buddhist. (GM 3:17). He sees the Buddha specifically as one who is committed to this view: “Ressentiment is what is forbidden par excellence for the sick —it is their specific evil—unfortunately also their most natural inclination. This was comprehended by that profound physiologist, the Buddha. His "religion” should rather be called a kind of hygiene, lest it be confused with such pitiable phenomena as Christianity: its effectiveness was made conditional on the victory over sentiment. To liberate the soul from this is the first step toward recovery. “Not by enmity is enmity ended; by friendliness enmity is ended”: these words stand at the beginning of the doctrine of the Buddha: It is not morality that speaks thus; thus speaks physiology. (EH, ‘wise’: 6)
89 ethics generally follows this Christian framework unthinkingly: even when the Christian God is removed from an ethical system, his shadow lingers on in the assumption that “good” and “evil” are transcendent: that they are “out there” to be discovered. Human values, he argues, are instead entirely constructed: they are, like all other ideological constructions, mere interpretations rather than discoveries about the actual world. In Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche puts this formula together in very clear terms: One knows my demand of philosophers that they place themselves beyond good and evil – that they have the illusion of moral judgement beneath them. This demand follows from an insight first formulated by me: that there are no moral facts whatever. Moral judgement has this in common with religious judgement that it believes in realities which do not exist. Morality is only an interpretation of certain phenomena, more precisely a misinterpretation. […] Morality is merely signlanguage, merely symptomatology: one must already know what it is about to derive profit from it.195
Nietzsche proposes that new valuation be found in the realm “beyond” good and evil, but makes clear in this passage that those who hope to affirm the world and create anew must first understand how values have been created. The Genealogy of attacks the prominent features of modern morality, including piety, asceticism, and weakness, in order to open up “a tremendous new prospect” to be discovered when “every kind of mistrust, suspicion, fear leaps up” and gives rise to “this new demand: we need a critique of moral values, the value of these values themselves must first be called in question…”196 Here, Nietzsche argues that because values have no transcendent source and so are not given in the nature of things, it is necessary to examine why they were created, and what interests and projects they serve. 195 Nietzsche TI, ‘improvers’ 2 196 Ibid. p. 20.
90 On the Genealogy of Morals (1887) is a “historical” elaboration on claims he leveled in Beyond Good and Evil (1886).197 Here, Nietzsche claims that the idea of good and evil has displaced an effectively nonmoral (and so preferable) conception of good and bad, which was also based on a false dichotomy. The good vs. evil dichotomy invented to replace it merely inverts the valuation, maintaining the same dualistic value structure. This inversion is motivated by a pathos Nietzsche names “ressentiment.”198 Under the ideology of ressentiment, the new good is characterized by servility, weakness, solemnity, and submission. What the Nobles thought good is placed in a new category: “evil.” Evil, on this view, is characterized by Nietzsche’s Dionysian valuation schema: power, affirmation, dominance, mirth, beauty, and creativity. He criticizes the failure of the “slaves” to create anew. By merely inverting the lifeaffirming dichotomy that oppressed them, they create a system that “denies the deepest and the highest desires of life and takes God for the enemy of life….”199 This Christian “slave” morality makes human beings 197 BGE is, in turn, a more critical approach to ideas he introduced through his mythical, poetic
story, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (18831891). 198 The story he tells goes like this: the happy, Dionysian “nobles” of this archaic society (specifically ancient Greek society) valued their own goodness in contrast to the “badness” of the “slaves,” who they regarded with contempt. These nobles valued happiness above all. They considered the lives of individual “slaves” disposable, but were also dependent upon the existence of the “slave” category to define the shape of their own superior identity. The “slaves,” in turn, are convinced of their inferiority and forced into a state of obsessive ressentiment. Their unbearable ressentiment motivates them to construct a Christian system of morality in retaliation—the “priestly” morality of pity. Because they believe their lives are not worth living, they glorify lives of suffering and emphasize weakness as a virtue. They consider human life pitiable and look to a heavenly realm beyond. “Christianity,” he claims, “is the religion of pity,” and this is ethically disastrous, because “suffering itself becomes contagious through pity.” Christian pity was designed to undermine the nobility by inverting the noble mode of valuation to create a new good: namely, everything the nobles thought was bad. 199 Nietzsche, TI, ‘antinature,’ 4
91 miserable because it is not creative. It fails to destroy previous values and start from a new, unprecedented “dawn.” Instead, the man of ressentiment actually accepts the identity his oppressor has imposed upon him. Enviously, he becomes obsessed with the happy ones. Ressentiment manifests as a “cauldron of unsatisfied hatred” that takes the “evil” other as its central focus. 200 Ressentiment is not just an attitude, but also a deed. It is much more than “resentment”—it is also a reversing of sentiment; the act of weak, revaluation. He calls this actionelement of ressentiment a “No.” He writes, “this No is its creative deed. This inversion of the value positing eye—this need to direct one’s view outward instead of back to oneself—is of the essence of ressentiment....”201 Within the constraints of the dichotomy imposed by the oppressor, the oppressed faces a choice to either accept with selfloathing the oppressor’s definition of him as weak, or embrace weakness with a “vengeance” and assert the superiority of the meek with the invention of “slave morality,” and “bad conscience.” To make the former choice is to remain abject; to make the latter choice is to take pride in abjection. The only alternative is to destroy the dichotomy altogether to create an ethics for the future. Nietzsche’s rejection of moral facts is not an assertion that all systems of human valuation are equal. For him, valuation is a process of creative interpretation, and, given various contexts, some interpretations are better than others. Nietzsche makes his commitment to certain ethical definitions clear: What is good? Everything that enhances people's feeling of power, will to 200 Nietzsche, GM 1:11 201 Ibid. 1:10
92 power, power itself. What is bad? Everything stemming from weakness. What is happiness? The feeling that power is growing, that some resistance has been overcome.202 These definitions are intertwined with several other commitments: (1) that the only value is aesthetic value, and it is for aesthetic reasons that power is valuable, (2) that our ethical systems should be as close to our interpretation of the best in the natural world (of Will to Power and the eternal affirmation of becoming) as possible, and (3) in this vein, we should strive always towards overcoming and self overcoming, taking Nietzsche’s imaginary Übermensch as a model. As early as The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche was committed to the Schopenhauerian idea that “only as an aesthetic phenomenon is existence and the world eternally justified.”203 He maintains this conviction over the course of his career, and it remains the foundational mode of assessment for his creation of new values. In the realm beyond good and evil, Nietzsche still finds in 1882 that “as an aesthetic phenomenon existence is still bearable to us.”204 Many of his arguments for one way of living over another are grounded in conceptions of what he (and by extension, other “free spirits”) find aesthetically pleasing. Arguing that we should prefer powerful types, he notes: “this is at bottom a question of taste and of aesthetics: would it be desirable that the ‘most respectable,’ i.e., most tedious, species of man should survive?”205 If the world is a function of the Will to Power, and Nietzsche argues that it is, then
202 Nietzsche, A 2 203 Nietzsche, BT 5:5 204 Nietzsche, GS 2:107 205 Nietzsche, WP 2:353
93 weakness and servility are antinatural—they will inevitably be overcome. On Nietzsche’s view, aesthetics is a productive mode of valuation because it is “natural.” Nietzsche does not appeal to a transcendental ideal of beauty—he finds that “the beautiful exists just as little as does the good, or the true”—but he does not take aesthetics to be purely subjective. As with his ethical valuation, he takes some manifestations of existence to be more beautiful than others. He grounds his aesthetic valuation in his metaphysical claims. On the metaphysical level, the Will wills itself and affirms itself through aesthetic ecstasy—this is the fundamental natural process of existence. Nietzsche considers the experience of beauty to be embodied phenomena in a way moral values could never be: After all, aesthetics is nothing but applied physiology. My “fact”, my “petit fait vrai”, is that I stop breathing easily once this music starts affecting me; that my foot […] has a need for tempo, dance […] but doesn't my stomach protest, too? My heart? My circulation? Aren't my intestines saddened? Do I not suddenly grow hoarse as I listen . . . To listen to Wagner, I need pastilles Gerandel . . . And so I ask myself: what does my whole body actually want from music? Because there is no soul . . . 206
Nietzsche uses the phenomenon of physiological reactions to music to prove that beauty is something with physical effects. His characterization here can be seen also in the light of his belief that Becoming is a kind of music itself: a symphony made up of infinite movements. Nietzsche prefers the tragic, the Dionysian, the orgiastic. In short, he prefers the sublime aesthetic. The sublime, he argues, best describes the world as it is, rather than how the idealist might imagine it to look in a perfect transcendental realm. The sublime encompasses the horror and chaos of the human saga. If an individual is committed to 206 Nietzsche, NCW ‘Objections’
94 affirming life as it is rather than rejecting life for a perfect beyond, she must learn to see beauty in the sublime. Nietzsche does not want to apply an antiseptic to the world in order to affirm it. He wants to swallow it whole: bloody, wild, and mindlessly violent. He often connects the idea of the sublime with the concept of the Dionysian dance—a perfect aesthetic affirmation—in which man loses himself in totality. Nietzsche's prophet himself dances, crying, “Now I am light, now I fly, now I see myself beneath myself, now a god dances through me.”207 Zarathustra says that he could only believe in a god who could dance.208 To affirm the sublime aesthetic and to perpetuate it through one’s own works is a way to naturalize human values. To enjoy the sublime world as it plays out in the process of overcoming is an evaluative choice that must also manifest in action. Nietzsche insists that our reconstruction of how to live must also be naturalistic: it must correspond with the activity of a world that is constantly overcoming. Nietzsche writes, “I too speak of a ‘return to nature’, although it is not really a goingback but a goingup – up into a high, free, even frightful nature and naturalness, such as plays with great tasks.”209 Existence, on his view, is constantly striving towards the higher. He begins his revaluation of ethics from the premise that it is wrong to project false morality onto nature, because resistance impedes “the efforts of nature to achieve a higher type.”210 One of his most important complaints against human morality to date is that it is “antinatural.”
207 Nietzsche, Z 1:1 208 Ibid. 209 Nietzsche ,TI ‘Germans,’ 48 210 Nietzsche, WP 2:6
95 Of course, all actions and valuations are “natural” insofar as they are manifestations of the Will to Power. The strongest, most vital elements of nature are embodied in human affirmation and overcoming. Our negation and submission constitute weakness embodied. When we speak of values we do so under the inspiration and from the perspective of life: life itself evaluates through us when we establish values…. From this it follows that even that antinature of a morality which conceives God as the contrary concept to and condemnation of life is only a value judgement on the part of life – of what life? of what kind of life? – But I have already given the answer: of declining, debilitated, weary, condemned life.211 When Schopenhauer calls for a battle against the Will to Live, Nietzsche believes he is manifesting all that is weak and “condemned” to perish. Instead of fighting passions and drives, Nietzsche believes we should embrace them, because these are all drives for power. Instead of sickliness, this affirmation promotes health and vitality. Health is aesthetically desirable and physiologically palpable, so it is unsurprising that Nietzsche lingers on it: All naturalism in morality, that is all healthy morality, is dominated by an instinct of life […] Antinatural morality, that is virtually every morality that has hitherto been taught, reverenced and preached, turns on the contrary precisely against the instincts of life.212 Embedded in all of this is the assumption that nature—as it plays out the program of the Will to Power—is constantly struggling to evolve into loftier states: to increase its power. As we have seen, the natural world of becoming achieves this though constant overcoming, and this most natural and most affirmative practice is at the heart of Nietzsche’s ethical prescription. Nietzsche uses the character of the Übermensch to illustrate how human beings should
211 Nietzsche, TI 5 212 Nietzsche, TI ‘morality,’ 4
96 engage in overcoming. Nietzsche introduces the Übermensch in Thus Spoke Zarathustra: “I teach you the Superman. Man is something to be surpassed. What have ye done to surpass man?”213 The Übermensch surpasses humanity—and his significance goes further. The Übermensch shows how selftransformation constitutes revaluation. Nietzsche sees these projects united because he considers the self and the world to be continuous in the flux of becoming. “Let us not undervalue this,” Nietzsche writes, “we ourselves, we free spirits, are already a ‘revaluation of all values.’ An incarnate declaration of war and victory over all ancient conceptions of ‘true’ and ‘untrue.’”214 Nietzsche’s Übermensch is a human who attains power, freedom, and joy by transcending false dichotomies and mastering the interpretive artistry of the Will to Power. Nietzsche does not believe that the bulk of men can rise above their social conditioning to think outside of cultural moral constructions, but exactly this, he thinks, is possible for a few after tremendous and continuous effort. In the Genealogy, Nietzsche makes a wish: Grant me from time to time—if there are divine goddesses in the realm beyond good and evil—grant me the sight, but one glance of something perfect, wholly achieved, happy, mighty, triumphant, something still capable of arousing fear! Of a man who justifies man, of a complementary and redeeming lucky hit on the part of man for the sake of which one may still believe in man!215
The Übermensch he describes here in the Genealogy represents humanity’s highest potential: true creativity. Nietzsche calls the Übermensch “the designation of a kind of supreme
213 Nietzsche, Z. 1:1 214 Nietzsche, A 13 215 Nietzsche, GM 2:12
97 achievement.”216 This supreme achievement is, in short, the ability to dwell beyond the duality of good and evil, but there is no permanent residence in this domain—there are no “divine goddesses in the realm beyond good and evil.” For Nietzsche, true mastery of the world is less important than mastery over the self, for “who cannot obey himself is commanded.”217 It is not enough for one to have attained selfmastery: such a claim would be incompatible with Nietzsche’s metaphysics of the constant becoming of the self. To become an Übermensch is to reach a peak in the process of a perpetual, cyclical struggle of selfovercoming. The self is to be constantly overcome, and it is only in those moments of selfovercoming that Übermensch status can be reached. The Übermensch cannot remain a static being. This kind of mastery involves, first, selfknowledge. What it is to have knowledge of the self is, in Nietzsche’s view, quite a radical demand, for it entails that one truly comprehends the unity of the self and the world. It demands no less than our understanding of ourselves as becoming; as affirmation; as Will to Power. It demands that we identify with the flux. It entails that we must transcend the ego. The Übermensch is the ultimate embodiment of psychological liberation from oppressive systems of thought: he embodies total power, creativity, innocent becoming, and constant affirmation of life and the Will to Power. I have shown in this chapter that Nietzsche, in defiance of metaphysical idealism, formulates a realist metaphysical system characterized by a commitment to the irreducibility of multiplicity and to the primacy of becoming. In defiance of deontological, lifedenying moral systems justified by faulty idealist metaphysics, he suggests an affirmative, creative,
216 Nietzsche, EH ‘books,’ 1 217 Nietzsche, Z 1:1
98 nonmoral revaluation of human ethics. The next chapter, which explains Aurobindo’s arguments for a world of divine play, will reveal similar preoccupations and arguments. We will see that Aurobindo, like Nietzsche, attempts to naturalize his philosophy by embracing realism and deconstructing ethics. As I will show in chapter four, these similar projects can be attributed to a need to respond to related problems in their respective moments and geographies.
99 Chapter 3: Aurobindo’s līlā
If we look at WorldExistence rather in its relation to the selfdelight of eternally existent being, we may regard, describe and realise it as Lila, the play, the child’s joy, the poet’s joy, the actor’s joy, the mechanician’s joy of the Soul of things eternally young, perpetually inexhaustible, creating and recreating Himself in Himself for the sheer bliss of that self creation, of that selfrepresentation, — Himself the play, Himself the player, Himself the playground. […] The world of which we are a part is in its most obvious view a movement of Force; but that Force, when we penetrate its appearances, proves to be a constant and yet always mutable rhythm of creative consciousness casting up, projecting in itself phenomenal truths of its own infinite and eternal being; and this rhythm is in its essence, cause and purpose a play of the infinite delight of being ever busy with its own innumerable selfrepresentations. Aurobindo, The Life Divine, p. 111
Like Nietzsche, Aurobindo uses a unifying theory—in this case, līlāvāda—to replace an idealist, illusionist worldview with a realist worldview. In this chapter, I consider Aurobindo’s refutation in The Life Divine of the idealistic theory of māyā (world as illusion) articulated by the tradition of Advaita Vedānta he inherited through Śaṅkara. I then address his use of līlā (world as divine play) to naturalize Advaita metaphysics and so to redress the
100 failures of illusionism and to affirm realism. 218 Aurobindo, I will show, argues that existence is not a unity that falsely appears as multiplicity, but instead is the manifestation of one in many forms; that it is not stasis that falsely appears to change, but instead is a constant process of becoming and overcoming. Ethically, Aurobindo argues that Brahman’s manifestation as līlā demands lifeaffirmation rather than lifenegation; that human beings should enjoy and engage with the phenomenal world rather than turn away from it towards an imagined transcendental realm. Līlā also leads Aurobindo to a Nietzschean deconstruction of ethics and to the conclusion that the best human life as one of continual overcoming of the self and the world, rather than submission to institutionalized moral systems.
1. Contextualizing līlā Advaita (nondual) Vedānta is a subschool of the Vedānta darśana, one of the six orthodox schools of classical Indian philosophy. Advaita was systemized by Ādi Śaṅkarācārya (ca. 788 – 820). Advaita Vedānta takes the Upaniṣads, the Bhagavadgītā, and the Brahma Sūtras as the scriptural foundation for a philosophy of radical monism that identifies the individual self (ātman) with the ultimate nature of the universe (Brahman). Mokṣa (liberation) is the experiential realization of this identity. The true world—the spiritual consciousness that comprises the only reality—is Brahman alone. Brahman is characterized
218 Most commentators, like Steven Phillips (1986) and many of Aurobindo’s devotees, put
mysticism at the heart of Aurobindo’s philosophy. Others, like U. C. Dubey, point to Integralism as the most distinctive feature of his thought. Richard Hartz argues that Aurobindo’s most important role was as a poet. These themes are all important to Aurobindo’s project, but I am most interested not in biography, but rather in the history of his ideas. In this context, Aurobindo’ theory of līlā comes to the fore as the reconstruction that was both most influential and most unique to him.
101 by saccidānanda—being (sat), consciousness (cit), and bliss (ānanda)—the three descriptors meant to express Brahman’s essential being. Saccidānanda is not an attribute of Brahman, because Brahman is argued to be ineffable—it can only be experienced directly. For a human being, to ‘realise’ one’s unity with Brahman is to experience pure saccidānanda. Eliot Deutsch puts it nicely, describing Brahman as “a name for the experience of the timeless plenitude of being.”219 Advaita is soteriological: it is intended to bring human beings liberation from saṃsāra, the cycle of death and rebirth, into the plenitude of being, consciousness, and bliss. The existence of the self (ātman/Brahman), Śaṅkara argues, is selfevident because it is the basis for all knowledge and experience. The fact of experience proves the existence of the self, so the self requires no further proof. For, he writes, “every one is conscious of the existence of (his) Self, and never thinks ‘I am not.’ If the existence of the Self were not known, every one would think ‘I am not.’”220 Brahman is held to be the cause of the empirical world. Śaṅkara argues that this must be the case because Brahman, “that omniscient omnipotent cause,” is the only explanation for the world’s creation, since the world cannot proceed from “a nonintelligent pradhāna [eternal fundamental substance], or from atoms, or from nonbeing, or from a being subject to transmigration; nor, again, can it proceed from its own nature (i.e., spontaneously, without a cause).”221 He argues, that is, that the empirical world cannot create or sustain itself without an original, uncaused cause. Only Brahman is without cause, and therefore independent. This independence indicates Brahman’s ultimate
219 Eliot Deutsch, Advaita Vedanta (Honolulu, HI: EastWest Center Press, 1969).p. 9 220 Radhakrishnan and Moore, A Sourcebook in Indian Philosophy, 511. 221 Ibid.
102 reality, according to Śaṅkara, while the dependence of the empirical world implies that it cannot be ultimately real. The empirical world, however, presents a problem for Advaita Vedānta. In the language of metaphysical idealism, this amounts to the problem of reconciling “the One and the Many,” when speaking spatially, and “Being and Becoming,’ when speaking temporally. The challenge here is to reconcile a single static being (transcendental reality) with the appearance of multiplicity and change (empirical existence). As nondualists, Advaitins cannot accept that Brahman and empirical reality are two separate entities. Brahman also must be singular and timeless. As Aurobindo puts it, “what we are confronted with is a pure static and immutable Reality and an illusory dynamism, the two absolutely contradictory of each other.”222 To maintain nonduality, Advaita deletes one of the two aspects of reality: the empirical world. To achieve mokṣa, one must dispel her ignorance (avidya): the belief that anything besides Brahman—the true self—is ultimately real. Śaṅkara describes ignorance as superimposition, a process by which we project the attributes of one known thing onto another object. To take a classical example, we might mistake a coiled segment of rope for a snake. To form this belief, we project a false image on the object. Śaṅkara takes this example to represent the way we interact with the world generally: we confuse the transcendental subject (ātman/Brahman) with empirical existence, and believe the latter to be as real as the former. We sense the conglomerate of matter that makes up our body, for instance, and think, “I am that body.” But our mistake, Śaṅkara argues, is to project the ultimate reality (I) onto an
222 Aurobindo, The Life Divine, 464.
103 ultimately unreal phenomenon (that body). If the phenomenal world is false, then Advaitins must account for its appearance. If Brahman is perfect—pure saccidānanda –it is not obvious why an imperfect world should be conjured. If the world is actually singular, timeless, and unchanging, why do we sense multiplicity and change within and surrounding us? Advaita Vedānta traditionally uses the concept of māyā as an explanation, arguing that Brahman casts the phenomenal world as an illusion. Śaṅkara did not invent māyā. The roots of the word are ancient. In the Ṛg Veda (c. 1500–1200 BCE), māyā usually refers to supernatural powers wielded by gods.223 Śaṅkara refers to the Upaniṣads (c. 800300 BCE). The Śvetāśvataropaniṣad, for instance, expresses māyā as an illusion: The past, the future, and what the Vedas declare— This whole world the illusionmaker (māyin) projects out of this [Brahman]. And in it by illusion (māyā) the other is confirmed. Now, one should know that Nature (Prakṛti) is illusion (māyā), And that the Mighty Lord (mahesvara) is the illusionmaker (māyin). (IV. 1, 910)224
Here, too, the illusion is cast like a spell. In the Bhagavadgītā (c. 200 BC – 100 AD), Kṛṣṇa—Brahman in human frame—explains to Arjuna, “I come into [empiric] being through My power (māyā).”225 Śaṅkara inherits these senses of māyā, but makes māyā central to Advaita Vedānta,
223 BenAmi Scharfstein, A Comparative History of World Philosophy: From the Upanishads
to Kant (New York: State University of New York Press, 1998). 224 Radhakrishnan and Moore, A Sourcebook in Indian Philosophy, 91. 225 Ibid., 116.
104 using it as his primary analysis of the phenomenal world. Māyā, here, can be understood ontologically as Brahman’s deceptive appearance; epistemologically as ignorance of the true nature of reality; and psychologically as the instinct for this ignorance.226 Māyā cannot, however, be considered external to Brahman on pain of reinstating dualism; it must be understood instead as Brahman misperceived. Vivekananda, for instance, argues that māyā occurs when we look at the Absolute through the lens of space, time, and causality, and end up with the distorted visage of our Universe, in all its variation.227 Though Śaṅkara concedes the reality of the world from an empirical perspective, he denies it from a metaphysical perspective.228 Though Aurobindo is an Advaitin, he argues that Śaṅkara’s māyāvāda is incorrect. He calls Śaṅkara’s monism “qualified illusionism,” because instead of eliminating dualism, māyāvāda merely qualifies a dualistic worldview by indicating degrees of partial reality, casting Brahman as ultimately real and the empirical world as a partially real illusion.229 Śaṅkara does in fact qualify his notion of absolute monism. S. Radhakrishnan explains that Śaṅkara “holds that the world is not nonexistent. It is not abhāva (nonexistent) or śūnya (void). Nevertheless, the world is not ultimate reality.”230 Aurobindo does not find a solution to the problem of the one and the many in this
226 Bina Gupta, An Introduction to Indian Philosophy: Perspectives on Reality, Knowledge,
and Freedom (New York: Routledge, 2012), 231. 227 Swami Vivekananda, “Jñāna Yoga (1915),” in Indian Philosophy in English: From Rennaisance to Independence, ed. Nalini Bhushan and Jay L. Garfield (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 371. 228 Radhakrishnan and Moore, A Sourcebook in Indian Philosophy, 148. 229 Aurobindo, The Life Divine, 471. 230 Radhakrishnan and Moore, A Sourcebook in Indian Philosophy, 507.
105 qualification—only a distraction from the fundamental problem. Māyā answers a mystery with a mystery. “In the philosophy of Śaṅkara,” he writes, “one feels the presence of a conflict, an opposition which this powerful intellect has stated with full force and masterfully arranged rather than solved with any finality.”231 He is not content to allow Advaitin metaphysical theory to hide behind the idea that the world is halfreal and halfunreal. In his chapter on “Reality and the Cosmic Illusion” Aurobindo writes, … the universe and ourselves may be a true reality though of a lesser order, or they may be partly real, partly unreal, or they may be an unreal reality. If they are at all a true reality, there is no place for any theory of Maya; there is no illusory creation. If they are partly real, partly unreal, the fault must lie in something wrong either in the cosmic selfawareness or in our own seeing of ourselves and the universe which produces an error of being, an error of knowledge, an error in the dynamis of existence.232 Here, Aurobindo deals three blows, attempting to weaken any claim that the world of appearances can be partially real by showing the implications of an illusion persisting in any gradient of reality other than full reality. He argues that a “real” illusion is impossible, because such a creation would be no illusion at all: it would be real. In this case, there would be two full realities: one illusory and one fundamental. A real illusion is impossible. He then aims a second blow: if there is an illusion and we are mistaken not to see beyond it, and if we are a part of Brahman, then Brahman is mistaken, subject to an “error of being.” This is an unacceptable conclusion, for Brahman cannot be mistaken. Thirdly, he levels a serious accusation to any Adviatin: that Śaṅkara is still a dualist, of sorts, wearing the trappings of a nondualist. He attempts to show that the attempts to reconcile a metaphysically 231 Aurobindo, The Life Divine, 477–478. 232 Ibid., 471–472.
106 illusory māyā with an absolute monism ultimately fall short because any attempt to qualify māyā as partially real is insufficient to defend against his claim that Shankara’s wordless, inactive Self and his Maya of many names and forms are equally disparate and irreconcilable entities; their rigid antagonism can terminate only by the dissolution of the multitudinous illusion into the sole Truth of an eternal Silence.233 That is, the illusory reality in this case does comprise a true reality other than Brahman—until it is destroyed. This inconsistency is the primary subject of Aurobindo’s deconstruction of māyā and ultimate reconstruction of līlā. 234 Aurobindo also attacks another fundamental premise of māyāvāda: the claim that our senses deceive us. In The Life Divine, Aurobindo examines the classic analogies used to describe māyā : certain phrases used and the description of two of the states of consciousness as sleep and dream may be taken as if they annulled the emphasis on the universal Reality; these passages open the gates to the illusionist idea and have been made the foundation for an uncompromising system of that nature.235 Māyāvadins argue that if life is like a dream, and dreams are unreal, then life might be unreal.
233 Ibid., 9. 234 Aurobindo’s rhetoric, technique, and destination are all integrative—his aim in all things is
to harmonize and to construct. His methodology is worth complicating. Aurobindo’s use of constructive rhetoric may distract from the important deconstructive aspect of his project. In order to build the bulwark of his creative project, Aurobindo dismantles past constructs so he can reassemble them. In doing so, he achieves bādha: a “negation” or “contradiction.” As Bina Gupta points out in her Introduction to Indian Philosophy, bādha “not only requires rejection of an object, or a new content of consciousness, but also that rectification occurs in light of a new judgment to which belief is attached and which replaces the initial judgment.” This method of rational cancellation is not new to Aurobindo, but is consistent with classical Indian methods of negation, and was used by Śaṅkara in his Brahmasūtrabhāṣya to show how Brahman cancels all other discrete realities. 235 Aurobindo, The Life Divine, 468.
107 Aurobindo argues that even if life is like a dream, dreams are still as real as the rest of life. He refutes three reasons to consider dreams unreal. A dream does not affect our waking lives in the morning, he concedes, but this does not make a dream unreal. It is merely a sensation. “Similarly,” he writes, “the fact that worldexistence seems unreal to us when we pass into the spiritual silence or into some Nirvana, does not of itself prove that the cosmos was all the time an illusion”236 Dreams might be considered unreal because their episodes do not recur or follow a clear path, but Aurobindo argues that lives, like dreams, actually lack coherent narrative, and that dreams sometimes recur or follow a plausible, lifelike storyline. Similarly, dreams cannot be ruled unreal because they are evanescent, because our lives and the episodes within them are also evanescent. What changes between sleep and waking, Aurobindo argues, is no more than a state of consciousness within the real. Aurobindo concludes that our senses do not in fact deceive us. If we have not experienced saccidānanda, it is only because we have not searched far enough with our senses into this reality. Saccidānanda, in his view, is an empirical experience like any other. The world is not an illusion produced by Brahman but a perfectly real, empirically observable manifestation of Brahman. Līlā describes Brahman’s activity of manifestation in space and
236 Ibid., 436.
108 time.237 Aurobindo uses līlā as the primary explanation for the phenomenal world, but neither he nor Śaṅkara introduced the term. A. K. Coomaraswamy notes that the idea of divine play occurred in the Ṛg Veda (which Aurobindo translated while publishing installments of Arya) and the Upaniṣads, and speculates that “līlā must be connected with Lelāy, ‘to flare’ or ‘flicker’ or ‘flame.’” Līlā was often used to connote the games of gods, or the play of Agni’s fire. Śaṅkara was familiar with līlā in classical scripture, and he reintroduced it in the context of Advaita Vedānta as an explanation of Brahman’s motivation. He anticipated one of Aurobindo’s critiques: he was concerned that the falsity of māyā might indicate a flawed Brahman. Because a true Advaitin could admit neither an error in the creation nor that Brahman might have a need for māyā (which would indicate a lack) māyā was described as līlā, mere play. Śaṅkara, however, only described līlā only as a psychological motivation. Śaṅkara’s līlā—which is marginal to his philosophical system—has no metaphysical or
237 Many interpretations of Aurobindo count Aurobindo’s mystical experiences as the only, or
the primary, source of his thought; but as Dubey points out, Aurobindo “is of the view that so long as we are in the domain of the mind, reason is the highest means of knowledge and we must not give preference to any other means of knowledge in its place.” (Dubey, 3031) Aurobindo’s first successful experience of the total stillness of nirvāṇa was accompanied by a profound sense of the illusory nature of the world—that all this actually is māyā. Heehs writes: “It was precisely the experience that Aurobindo did not want from yoga. He had always rejected mayavada, the school of vedānta that holds that the world is an illusion. Now he felt himself plunged in the experience that mayavada is based on, and it was so strong he could not have gotten out of it even if he had tried.” (Lives 114) Nonetheleess, Aurobindo cultivated a reasoned critique of māyāvāda prior to any access to an empirical assessment of nirvāṇa. Aurobindo maintains that relying on logic alone shows cowardice in the face of immensity; but he also explains that there are two ways of knowing for the supermind: objective cognition by projected consciousness, and subjective knowledge by identity. It can be said fairly that he engages robustly in both the logic of rationality and the “logic of infinity”; in the knowledge of observation and the “knowledge by identity.”
109 ontological value. Aurobindo’s Brahman manifests itself through līlā rather than disguising itself with an illusion of māyā. Instead of deleting empirical reality to maintain the singularity of Brahman, Aurobindo integrates both aspects into one entity. The empirical world, on this view, is a process of joyful creative play. Aurobindo characterizes the activity of līlā as …the play, the child’s joy, the poet’s joy, the actor’s joy, the mechanician’s joy of the Soul of things eternally young, perpetually inexhaustible, creating and recreating Himself in Himself for the sheer bliss of that self creation.238 This Brahman does not merely enjoy the empirical world from a distance—it inheres in and constitutes the empirical world. As we will see, Aurobindo’s use of līlā grounds an argument for metaphysical affirmation.
2. Metaphysical Affirmation Aurobindo uses līlā to “affirm” the world. This term has a specific meaning in the metaphysical context: to affirm here is to assert that a given entity is real, and to “negate” means literally to deny the existence of a given entity. We have seen that Nietzsche the same language in his metaphysics. Aurobindo writes that humankind “has negated the existence of the individual being, negated the existence of the cosmos […] but it is also constantly affirming these things.” Here, Aurobindo refers to the māyāvādins. He sees their illusionism as part of a global, worldnegating trend that arises when the principle of negation prevails over the principle of affirmation and becomes universal and absolute. Thence arise the great worldnegating religions and philosophies; thence too a recoil of the lifemotive from itself and a seeking 238 Aurobindo, The Life Divine, 111.
110 after a life elsewhere flawless and eternal or a will to annul life itself in an immobile Reality or an original NonExistence. In India the philosophy of worldnegation has been given formulations of supreme power and value by two of the greatest of her thinkers, Buddha and Shankara.239 In revaluing Advaita Vedānta, Aurobindo hopes to contribute to a renewed “worldaffirming” era resonant of his vision of the Vedic past. While traditional Advaita negates the “multiplicity” and “becoming” in existence, Aurobindo affirms these realities. He achieves this by using līlā as the explanation for Brahman’s manifestation as a variegated, changing entity. This characterization resolves the problem of the one and the many in Advaita—instead of assuming that Brahman can consist of either one or many parts, Aurobindo argues that it can be both through playing with itself, rather than casting illusions. As we will see, his descriptions of Brahman’s evolutionary process are meant to show how Brahman might unfold into empirical reality, rather than separate from it. Aurobindo also uses līlā to give life meaning, finding a reason for the empirical world to exist that is unavailable to māyāvāda. Śaṅkara compares Brahman to a magician who enjoys watching his audience being deceived, fully aware his performances are only tricks and illusions.240 If this is the case, Aurobindo argues, and if māyā is unreal, and if Brahman is always residing in saccidānanda, aloof from its creation, then there is no reason for humans to achieve mokṣa, and the project of Advaita is bunk. He writes, “salvation cannot be of importance if bondage is unreal and bondage cannot be real unless Maya and her world are real.”241 Instead of constructing a world in which Brahman is unaffected by creation,
239 Ibid., 431. 240 Radhakrishnan and Moore, A Sourcebook in Indian Philosophy, 472. 241 Aurobindo, The Life Divine, 464.
111 Aurobindo argues that Brahman restricts its perspectives in order to deceive itself. Being deceived, Brahman is able to enjoy selfdiscovery. This ability gives life a project, rather than making life an unnecessary trick. In Aurobindo’s view, līlā is the activity of Brahman’s own consciousness, as manifested in what Aurobindo calls “The Supermind.” In this way, līlā explains why the world exists, without sacrificing the reality of the world or making Brahman into a trickster or a fool. The following maxim succinctly encompasses the relation of Brahman to its own unfolding manifestation: Brahman is “…Himself the play, Himself the player, Himself the playground.”242 This trifold configuration ensures that Brahman’s own manifestation in life is divine. Brahman can manifest in the states of play, player, and playground simultaneously because it restricts its own perspectives in order to work its way out of the “knots of matter” it ties itself into over time. This long process of epiphany and overcoming gives līlā an objective. Aurobindo writes, “…all is a game or Lila; but a game too carries within itself an object to be accomplished and without the fulfilment of which that object would have no completeness of significance.”243 By plunging into a state of many limited perspectives—while simultaneously
maintaining
omniscience—Brahman
experiences
the
delight
of
selfovercoming in infinite variations. Aurobindo explains, “it can put forth many states of consciousness at a time, many dispositions of its Force, without ceasing to be the same consciousnessforce for ever. It is at once transcendental, universal and individual.”244 These
242 Ibid., 111. 243 Ibid., 867. 244 Ibid., 356.
112 simultaneous states allow Brahman to be at once One and Many. Aurobindo constantly references … unity which no play of multiplicity can abrogate or diminish. “Brahman is in all things, all things are in Brahman, all things are Brahman” is the triple formula of the comprehensive Supermind, a single truth of selfmanifestation in three aspects which it holds together and inseparably in its selfview as the fundamental knowledge from which it proceeds to the play of the cosmos.245
Aurobindo’s Brahman is hence both eternally one and eternally many, because the same consciousness manifests many discrete perspectives. In this process, it also manifests as matter and life, but its underlying form is always spirit. Like Heraclitus, Aurobindo accepts the reality of becoming, and characterizes Brahman as a force, or a process, instead of static, individual substance: The world of which we are a part is in its most obvious view a movement of Force; but that Force, when we penetrate its appearances, proves to be a constant and yet always mutable rhythm of creative consciousness casting up, projecting in itself phenomenal truths of its own infinite and eternal being; and this rhythm is in its essence, cause and purpose a play of the infinite delight of being ever busy with its own innumerable selfrepresentations.246
In this way, Aurobindo rebuilds the world of Brahman into one characterized not by falsehood, but by reality; not by deception, but by selfdiscovery; not by stasis, but by dynamism. Aurobindo’s world “becomes” in all directions, cycling constantly through different phases. Aurobindo devotes the bulk of The Life Divine to arranging the steps of Brahman’s
245 Ibid., 149. 246 Ibid., 111.
113 evolutionary process in dizzying configurations. For instance: This awakening to the Power in it is the gradual awakening to self. For Life is Force and Force is Power and Power is Will and Will is the working of the MasterConsciousness. […] But though Life is Power and the growth of individual life means the growth of the individual Power, still […] it is impossible for a divided and individualized consciousness and a divided, individualized and therefore limited power and will to be master of the AllForce; only the AllWill can be that and the individual only, if at all, by becoming again one with the AllWill and therefore with the AllForce.247 For the sake of brevity, I will not detail the elaborate and shifting taxonomies of Aurobindo’s “indivisible series and ever ascending degrees of the worldexistence,” but the process demands a swift overview. 248 Brahman manifests in līlā by plunging into a state of multiplicity through various phases of involution before opening again into greater and greater unities, all while maintaining an underlying substratum of unity. To simplify the elaborate process: out of saccidānanda, Brahman begins its process of involution by manifesting in space and time as the Supermind. The Supermind devolves into “Mind,” then “Life,” and finally “Matter.” Brahman ties itself into “knots of matter,” as Aurobindo puts it. Tying these knots is part of the delight of Līlā. More delightful, however, is the process of untying them and thereby overcoming obstacles. As Brahman evolves, it enjoys the līlā of overcoming the limitations of its evolutes as it struggles out of mere matter to manifest life, then to manifest mind, and finally upwards into the Supermind before consolidating all forms of its consciousness into a
247 Ibid., 191. 248 Ibid., 241.
114 unified experience of saccidānanda.249
Saccidānanda the loftiest poise of Brahman—is the experience of timeless, formless
joy in being. When extended into space and time, saccidānanda manifests as Supermind, “the more elastic phrase.”250 Supermind, or “truth consciousness,” is the imaginative, creative, comprehending force of the universe. This aspect of Brahman is especially important to Aurobindo because the Supermind serves as a conduit from saccidānanda to the world of finitudes. This is the force that comprehends Līlā. U. C. Dubey compares the Supermind to the Holy Spirit of the Christian trinity, calling it “the fourth—the creative, the dynamic, and the God aspect of Saccidānanda.”251 Aurobindo calls it “the beginning and end of all creation and arrangement, the alpha and the omega, the starting point of all differentiation, the instrument of all unification, originative, executive and consummative…”252 The Supermind creates the material world as it perceives and interprets it. Mind—the undergrowth of Supermind—can only desire the omniscient knowledge available to the Supermind. This is the “lifemind, a vital mentality which is an instrument of desire; this is not satisfied with the actual, it is a dealer in possibilities…an enlarged selfaffirmation and aggrandizement of its terrain for power and profit.”253 It is the human mind. The capacity of Mind—to desire greater knowledge—distinguishes humans from 249 Aurobindo also uses the terms Nature, Power, RealIdea, Force, Will, Power, AllForce,
Spirit, Consciousness, Truth Consciousness, etc. Many of their definitions conflate with one another. Untangling each of them here would by unwieldy and unnecessary. 250 Aurobindo, The Life Divine, 133. 251 U. C. Dubey, “Integralism: The Distinctive Feature of Sri Aurobindo’s Philosophy,” in Understanding Thoughts of Sri Aurobindo, ed. Krishna Roy and Indrani Sanyal (Kolkata: Jadavpur University, 2007). 252 Aurobindo, The Life Divine, 134. 253 Ibid., 429.
115 animals. Mind devolves into Life, the animated force of Brahman moved by the Will to overcome and devour and aggrandize.254 Matter, for Aurobindo, is never dead—it too is composed of Spirit. Once saccidānanda has diffused into matter, the cycle inevitably repeats. Aurobindo describes different organizational patterns as “poises” of Brahman. The three poises he describes are 1. the unity of all, 2. the modification of unity to support multiplicity (as Brahman manifests as the Supermind in space and time) and 3. the evolution of diversity. This movement between states is not linear: Brahman contracts and expands, condenses and diffuses, devours and regurgitates. The vector of Aurobindo’s evolution is multidirectional. As Gupta puts it, Brahman can be said to widen, heighten, and integrate. She explains this nicely: Widening signifies extension of scope (incorporation of coexistent forms and the development and growth toward higher forms): heightening leads to the ascent from the lower to the higher grade; and integration means that the ascent from the lower to the higher is not simply the rejection of the lower but rather the transformation of the lower to the higher.255 That is, saccidānanda never disappears—it only complicates. The continuance of all things, including memory, explains Aurobindo’s conception of death as another aspect of Life and nothing more. Death constitutes a moment, not a finitude; it is the process of the “devouring
254 This distinction of mind from mere life is curious when considered as a reaction to
Darwinism. On the one hand, Aurobindo resists Darwinian theory by insisting that human life is distinct from other kinds of animal life. On the other, he accounts for the fact that animal life evolves into human life. He also accepts that life manifests from matter, the lowest devolution of existence, though he maintains that this transmutation could only result from Brahman’s spiritual power. He maintains that purely biological processes could never transform matter into living things. 255 Gupta, An Introduction to Indian Philosophy.
116 of life by Life.”256 This consummation and regurgitation maintains Life and the material world. Aurobindo says of Life: “its principle is constant intershock and the struggle of the embodied life to exist in a world of mutual devouring. And this is the law of Death.”257 Nothing dies in Aurobindo’s world, but everything changes. Creation and destruction are constant. While Aurobindo’s metaphysical project maintains the primacy of being rhetorically, he revalues being as becoming in order to achieve this. The completeness of this revaluation is evident in this evocatively Nietzschean passage: We are and the world is a movement that continually progresses and increases by the inclusion of all the successions of the past in a present which represents itself to us as the beginning of all the successions of the future, — a beginning, a present that always eludes us because it is not, for it has perished before it is born. What is, is the eternal, indivisible succession of Time carrying on its stream a progressive movement of consciousness also indivisible. Duration then, eternally successive movement and change in Time, is the sole absolute. Becoming is the only being. 258 Aurobindo’s revaluation results partly from taking Darwinism—or at least its implication that all states are in flux—seriously. These scientific discoveries were important to many Advaitins, who wanted to assert the universal applicability of their tradition. Aurobindo supports his arguments by referring to “the drive of Science towards a Monism which is consistent with multiplicity towards the Vedic idea of the one essence with its many becomings.”259 While Vedic thought anticipates scientific discoveries in Aurobindo’s view, he emphasizes that modern science also validates his metaphysical Integralism.
256 Aurobindo, The Life Divine, 206. 257 Ibid., 205–206. 258 Ibid., 84. 259 Ibid., 16.
117 For Aurobindo, like Nietzsche, one of the most important “becomings” is that of the self. Each human being is a temporary arrangement of Brahman, not a distinct individual. He describes human life as a constant process of striving to reach saccidānanda by learning to think less like an alltoohuman “Mind” and more like the divine “Supermind.” Human beings, in his view, are capable of achieving “Supramental” status to become divine “Supermen” to guide the rest of humanity towards higher and higher stages of spiritual evolution.260 This evolution is a natural process. Achieving a Supramental state, on this view, does not mean entering into a state of permanence and stasis. It is not a purely transcendental state. Rather, it allows the Superman to enjoy, in full, the play of the divine līlā and overflowing delight in the overcoming of obstacles. This kind of transcendence does not leave its subject’s empirical world behind. Rather, the empirical world is experienced as a divine symphony.
3. Ethical Affirmation Aurobindo’s commitment to affirming the reality and divinity of the empirical world serves a broader, practical purpose: it justifies an ethical affirmation of the life process. As with Nietzsche, this does not entail “saying yes” to everything: illusionism, for instance, is still out. It does entail a particular mode of evaluation and action. To affirm life is to value it positively by interpreting all aspects of experience not as a realm of illusory suffering, but as a field in which Brahman’s divine joy unfurls in each moment. To undertake this revaluation, one must first deconstruct institutionalized morality, which, Aurobindo argues, has been built
260 Ibid., 1104.
118 out of worldnegating traditions. To affirm life is also a demand for engagement with human life rather than passivity. This engagement should take the form of constant selfovercoming as an inclusive, collaborative effort that aims to bring all beings—not just the individual practitioner—into higher states of consciousness. Aurobindo imagines that līlā drives human beings towards this lifeaffirmation as part of its play: “the human mind,” he writes, “must seek always a complete affirmation; it can find it only by luminous reconciliation.”261 Much of Aurobindo’s commitment to lifeaffirmation plays out in his critique of nihilism (which he attributes to materialism) and pessimism (which he attributes to asceticism).
262
Nietzsche, as we have seen, criticizes the same attitudes. By nihilism,
Aurobindo means the view that life is meaningless; by pessimism, he means that life is not worth living. He writes about nihilism dominating Europe through materialism, and pessimism dominating India through asceticism: In Europe and in India, respectively, the negation of the materialist and the refusal of the ascetic have sought to assert themselves as the sole truth and to dominate the conception of Life. In India, if the result has been a great heaping up of the treasures of the Spirit, — or of some of them, — it has also been a great bankruptcy of Life; in Europe, the fullness of riches and the triumphant mastery of this world’s powers and possessions have progressed towards an equal bankruptcy in the things of the Spirit.263 Each way of thinking, he argues, endorses a poisonous system of valuation. Aurobindo argues throughout Life Divine that existence is meaningful only insofar as 261 Ibid., 10. 262 These are my distinctions, not Aurobindo’s, though they are consistent with his
descriptions. 263 Aurobindo, The Life Divine, 11.
119 it is conscious and goaldirected. He takes it as selfevident that a world empty of consciousness and purpose would be undesirable. He warns that without a spiritual aspiration, a person would be “only an insect crawling among other ephemeral insects on a speck of surface mud and water which has managed to form itself amid the appalling immensities of the physical universe.”264 In contrast to this nihilistic view—which he describes as unacceptably bleak—his līlā makes empirical, ordinary life meaningful by characterizing it as a manifestation of Brahman’s consciousness and arguing that Brahman plays by continually striving towards higher levels of transcendence. Aurobindo argues that materialists are ultimately nihilists, and fail to properly value life. He writes, “The rationalistic tendency of Materialism has done mankind this great service.”265 He appreciates materialism from a metaphysical standpoint because it is a realist position that allows for a true monism, but realism alone is only a first step; Aurobindo maintains that materialist do not look far enough into empirical experience, that they fail to search beyond their sensory organs to experience the consciousness that constitutes reality.266 The materialist is a nihilist because he imagines a world with no consciousness or purpose. Materialists admit consciousness only as the embodied experience produced by synaptic processes. They also imagine a mechanistic world in which existence is governed by the blind interplay of atoms following the laws of motion: a system of pure accident, with no goal. Ethically, this view implies that human life is devoid of any higher purpose, and negates the inevitability of transcendence. It generates a negative attitude towards spiritual aspirations,
264 Ibid., 48. 265 Ibid., 11. 266 Ibid., 9.
120 suggesting that our larger goal is only to live long enough to pass on our genetic material. Although Nietzsche also rejects materialism in favor of a more goaloriented, power hungry cosmos, he embraces nihilism on the grounds that giving meaning to life is a constructive and interpretive human project. Aurobindo instead maintains that Brahman gives life meaning. Although ascetics also condemn materialism in favor of spiritualism, they fail to engage with human life. He disputes these “illusionists” on the same metaphysical grounds on which he criticizes Śaṅkara and all māyāvadins, who he counts among them. But his critique of ascetics rests on an ethical failure in their pessimistic decision that life is not worth living. Māyāvada is not just metaphysically problematic—it is also …the whole basis of the pessimist theory of the world, — optimist, it may be, as to worlds and states beyond, but pessimist as to the earthly life and the destiny of the mental being in his dealings with the material universe. For it affirms that… only in the Spirit’s true quietude and not in its phenomenal activities can we reunite existence and consciousness with the divine selfdelight.267 Asceticism takes a disgusted attitude towards human life as futile and rejects “the mental being.” Though ascetics purport to deconstruct the ego and the self, Aurobindo contends that their project is ultimately individualistic and selfish: they attempt to achieve mokṣa only for themselves.268 They miss the point entirely. Materialism and asceticism develop, according to Aurobindo, in the context of a broader lifenegating trend. Aurobindo argues that the attitude of negation and the devaluation 267 Ibid., 263. 268 Like Nietzsche, Aurobindo appreciates demanding ascetic practices that drive the
practitioner to more successfully engage in the project of life, and bring others to the path of overcoming and transcendence. He himself spent over twenty years meditating in isolation in ascetic conditions.
121 of human life also contribute to a system of morality that trains humans not to recognize the delight of existence. Taking life to be fundamentally meaningless and undesirable encourages the apathy, passivity, and escapism that Aurobindo used to describe modern India. He, on the other hand, attempts to prove that the suffering we experience is actually a kind of habit produced by lifenegating morality. In reality, he argues, Brahman’s experience is always characterized by joy. A properly oriented human would emulate and participate in this joyful process. First, however, humans must overcome their own egoistic habits of projecting morality onto nature. While Aurobindo argues that the goal and climax of life is the experience of saccidānanda, he contends that empirical existence is not simply full of suffering: existence is delight, so human sensations of pain are merely subjective. In “Delight of Existence: The Problem” Aurobindo introduces and refutes ethical challenge to the validity of Brahman’s delight. First, he employs a classic paradox in Christian theology: if God inflicts suffering on His creatures, then God must be cruel. Aurobindo explains first that Christianity, or any religion with an extracosmic personal God, cannot survive this paradox “except by an unsatisfactory subterfuge which avoids the question at issue instead of answering it or a plain or implied Manicheanism which practically annuls the Godhead in attempting to justify its ways.”269 Brahman, he explains, is different, because “cruelty to others, I remaining immune or even participating in their sufferings by subsequent repentance or belated pity, is one thing;
269 Aurobindo, The Life Divine, 102.
122 selfinfliction of suffering, I being the sole existence, is quite another.”270 Brahman is incapable of perpetuating cruelty to “others” like the Christian god, because Brahman has no other. It can only harm itself—and then, its selfharm is inflicted only for the sake of achieving greater joy, and is in fact part of that joy. Aurobindo suggests that “the greatest part of the totality is either supramoral or inframoral or simply amoral.”271 The notions of good and bad, in any case, cannot describe the delight of Brahman. Despite that this delight imbues the world with value and affirmation, Aurobindo accepts that it is not quite appropriate to describe Brahman in these terms, because Brahman is ineffable. He worries that … the ideas of good and love which we thus bring into the concept of the AllDelight spring from a dualistic and divisional conception of things; they are based entirely on the relations between creature and creature, yet we persist in applying them to a problem which starts, on the contrary, from the assumption of the One who is all. Here, Aurobindo suggests that humans not impose their dualistic, invented moral systems onto the monistic reality that defies categorization. Though Brahman is Existence, Consciousness, and Bliss, there is no reason at all to believe that Brahman is in any way characterized by love or morality; and it would be wrong to believe this. In one essay provocatively titled “Beyond Good and Evil,” after Nietzsche’s book of the same name, Aurobindo lays out the ethical status of Brahman in no uncertain terms: God is beyond good and evil; man moving Godwards must become of one nature with him. He must transcend good and evil. God is beyond good and evil, not below them, not existing and limited by them, not even above them, but in a more absolute sense excedent and transcendent of the ideas of good 270 Ibid. 271 Aurobindo, Essays Divine and Human: Writings from Manuscripts 19101950, 149.
123 and evil.272 When Aurobindo suggests that man must “become of one nature” with a god “beyond good and evil,” he is making a claim about how to conceive of human ethics. He suggests we emulate Brahman. If Brahman is amoral, it follows from this injunction that human life cannot be fundamentally governed by moral absolutes. Human beings can better transcend their limits if they understand the truth: human morality is completely relative and makeshift; that our values are residual impulses of the basest form of consciousness. As we grow closer to saccidānanda, they disappear. Aurobindo clearly maintained this view of ethics throughout many years of writing. According to Phillips, Aurobindo’s book Karmayoga contrasts the observance of human ethical standards with the freedom of the liberated individual. Taking an almost Nietzschean view of conventional morality, he wrote that from an evolutionary viewpoint, ‘good and evil are…shifting quantities and change from time to time their meaning and value,’273 In his deconstruction of human ethics, Aurobindo tells his own genealogical story about the development of human morality, which he explains as a contextual and shifting phenomenon: “Good and evil,” he writes “come in with the development of mental consciousness… they develop with the human development.”274 Aurobindo sees the origin of morality not in any kind of moral conscience, but in the impulse of disgust at whatever displeases us. “This recoil or dislike is the primary origin of ethics,” he suggests.275 272 Ibid., 148. 273 Stephen H. Phillips, “Ethical Skepticism in the Philosophy of Aurobindo,” in Situating Sri
Aurobindo: A Reader, ed. Peter Heehs (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2013), 281. 274 Aurobindo, Essays Divine and Human: Writings from Manuscripts 19101950, 148. 275 Aurobindo, The Life Divine, 103.
124 Though this impulse is the beginning of ethics, Aurobindo is clear that it is not itself ethical. Recoil becomes rationalized and institutionalized as “blame and condemnation, or rather selfblame and selfcondemnation,” at which point ethics proper begin, and humans start policing one another by implementing elaborate ethical systems in their societies.276 Nonetheless, even this tendency towards guilt and the ethical systems that manifest from them are only the animalethic that evolved out of spontaneous emotional reactions. In the realm of ethics, too, there is a point at which Aurobindo sees himself as opposed to more conventional, ascetic yogis: “In many forms of yoga, this turning towards the divine if helped along by an ascetic rejection of the world. This is ruled out in integral yoga. What needs to be rejected is not action and life, but egoism and desire.”277 Aurobindo argues that these impulses of disgust or displeasure do not actually reflect pain experienced by Brahman, for the play of līlā is pure delight. Pain is enjoyed, rather, as an obstacle to be transcended: a knot to be untied. Just as Brahman is “good” in a sense altogether divorced from the good and evil of human morality, Aurobindo writes, “when we speak of universal delight of existence we mean something different from, more essential and wider than the ordinary emotional and sensational pleasure of the individual human creature.”278 He maintains that we associate certain stimuli with pain and others with pleasure simply out of “habit,” and no further biological obligation. Part of affirming life in full demands the willpower to determine our responses to stimuli. It is within our competence to return quite the opposite response, pleasure 276 Stephen H. Phillips, “Ethical Skepticism in the Philosophy of Aurobindo,” in Situating Sri
Aurobindo: A Reader, ed. Peter Heehs (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2013), 281. 277 Quoted in Phillips, “Ethical Skepticism in the Philosophy of Aurobindo,” 281. 278 Aurobindo, The Life Divine, 106.
125 where we used to have pain, pain where we used to have pleasure. It is equally within our competence to accustom the superficial being to return instead of the mechanical reactions of pleasure, pain and indifference that free reply of inalienable delight which is the constant experience of the true and vast BlissSelf within us.279 The most “natural” response, he concludes, is to emulate Brahman’s delight. In another Nietzschean move, Aurobindo explains that nature is ultimately governed by a force that “disturbs and destroys impartially, nonethically, according to the secret Will in it, according to the mute satisfaction of that Will.”280 As there is no morality to be found above humanity, there is none to be found in lower layers of existence, either. In its basest forms, nature is thoroughly amoral, even though it has the potential to manifest, in humanity, a subjective and makeshift ethical impulse. “Material nature,” he writes in a rare fit of brevity, “is not ethical.” 281 As humans are wrong to project morality onto Brahman, it is foolish and dangerous to project it onto nature as well; and Aurobindo has no sympathy for those who try: The attempt of human thought to force an ethical meaning onto the whole of Nature is one of those acts of willful and obstinate selfconfusion, one of those pathetic attempts of the human being to read himself, his limited habitual human self into all things and judge them from the standpoint he has personally evolved, which most effectively prevent him from arriving at real knowledge and complete sight.282 Here, he argues that the tendency to imagine morality as ontologically real reflects only our failure to overcome our individual egos, which act as lenses that distort the world through ignorance. In order to value the phenomenal world correctly, humans must transcend the 279 Ibid., 113. 280 Ibid., 103. 281 Ibid. 282 Ibid., 96.
126 egoistic tendency to interpret life through the prejudices we have erected in order to preserve our individuality. Aurobindo does express positive beliefs about how humans should live. To affirm the creation is not to say that it is “good” or even that it is not “evil” by the standards civilizations agree on. By this light, we can understand how he might include something as deplorable as colonialism in his worldaffirmation: it is affirmed because it is part of the divine process of evolution. More specifically, Aurobindo’s view, as explicated in “The Renaissance in India,” is that the imposition of British rule—a trough in the evolution of India’s national progress—is ultimately an expedient to India’s reclamation of freedom, expedited by a resurgence of consciousness of her Vedic roots and spiritual essence.283 In the political context, Aurobindo advocates the overcoming of British colonialism as part of the struggle towards the spiritual destiny of mankind. Aurobindo’s principal ethical injunction is selfovercoming. Following his path of Integral Advaita demands overcoming the individual ego in order to identify with Brahman and its activity of līlā. This entails a process of overcoming the bounds of mere humanity—one must overcome the limits of Mind in order to experience the Supermind. The project of overcoming also involves revaluation of values, entailing that humans overcome their socially constructed dualities and moralities. It is, after all, the ego and the dualities that lead mankind to extend their makeshift morals to cover the world, keeping it trapped in knots of Matter, Life, and Mind. This path of overcoming is not designed for everyone to tread at once. Aurobindo says
283 Aurobindo, “The Renaissance in India (1918).”
127 that, even though the goal is to eventually to abandon all egoistic dualities, the unenlightened should not preemptively abandon their inclinations against harm because the conventional order would come to ruin. People are not yet prepared to abandon morality, he contends, if they are not prepared to understand the ultimate truth.284 In all cases, however, Aurobindo opposes systemization of morals, because a superficial, dominating structure cannot possibly succeed in dominating the Force of Life and Desire.285 For those who are able to transcend these barriers, however, Aurobindo holds up the example of “The Divine Superman.” This concept appears to have been inspired by Nietzsche’s Übermensch, which is significant because both of them treat this character as the exemplar of perfect transcendence of the alltoohuman self. Aurobindo seems to reference Nietzsche in “The Divine Superman” when he writes, It has been well said by one who saw but through a veil and mistook the veil for the face, that thy aim is to become thyself; and he said well again that the nature of man is to transcend himself. This is indeed his nature and that is indeed the divine aim of his selftranscending.286 Aurobindo’s superman is an ultimately spiritual being: a “gnostic being” of a “higher supramental status” able to commune with the Supermind, or cosmic consciousness.287 His superman enjoys the divine play of līlā in its totality; he is not pinched into an individual human perspective. Aurobindo seems to believe, as expressed in a letter from April 1935, that he is well on his way to attaining the “supramentalisation” of a superman, but he is careful to
284 Aurobindo, The Life Divine, 61. 285 Phillips, “Ethical Skepticism in the Philosophy of Aurobindo,” 221. 286 Aurobindo, Essays Divine and Human: Writings from Manuscripts 19101950, 150. 287 Aurobindo, The Life Divine, 1104.
128 clarify that his project constitutes a gift to humankind: I have no intention of achieving the supramental for myself only — I am not doing anything for myself, as I have no personal need of anything, neither of salvation (Moksha) nor supramentalisation. If I am seeking after supramentalisation, it is because it is a thing that has to be done for the earth consciousness and if it is not done in myself, it cannot be done in others.288 To become a superman is to succeed completely at selfovercoming—to fully experience reality as līlā after a process of overcoming lifenegating attitudes and the resulting tendencies of the ego to project itself onto nature. I have shown how Aurobindo’s revaluation of līlā—Brahman’s divine play—was used to reconcile idealism and realism by providing a framework in which Brahman manifests in the empirical world instead of transcending it. Metaphysically, līlā affirms life by allowing for the multiplicity and constant change of phenomenal experience. At the same time, Aurobindo maintains that Brahman’s becoming is it’s very being, and that Brahman is one unified even in its manifestation in multitudes. Ethically, Aurobindo uses līlā to justify a revolt against nihilists and ascetics, who count empirical reality as meaningless and not worth living. Ascetics—caught up in the theory of māyā—advocate a turning away from life, but Aurobindo’s positive ethics advocate an embrace of life: a willful engagement with the evolutionary project of existence through the project of selfovercoming. He denies that human morality can be applied to existence, asserting that Brahman’s process of existence is completely beyond ethics.
288Quoted in Ranajit Sarkar, Beyond Good and Evil : A Comparative Study of the Moral
Philosophies of Nietzsche and Sri Aurobindo (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education, 2002), 283–284.
129 The final chapter returns to these themes, interpreting each through both Nietzsche and Aurobindo. Drawing the context provided in chapter one together with the analyses of chapters two and thee, we will see that each responds to related problems of modernity. Their philosophical systems are each meant to affirm life both metaphysically and ethically in the face of idealism.
130 Chapter 4: CrossCultural Echoes
Why we are not idealists. – Formerly, philosophers feared the senses. […] Today we are all sensualists, we philosophers of the present and future, not in theory but in praxis, in practice. The former, however, saw the senses as trying to lure them away from their world, from the cold kingdom of ‘ideas’, to a dangerous Southern isle where they feared their philosophers’ virtues would melt away like snow in the sun. [… A] true philosopher didn’t listen to life insofar as life is music; he denied the music of life – it is an old philosopher’s superstition that all music is sirenmusic. Today we are inclined to make the opposite judgement (which could itself be just as mistaken)…” Nietzsche, The Gay Science 5:372
Aurobindo and Nietzsche present two resonant voices in a crosscultural conversation. They share commitments to metaphysical multiplicity and becoming, and to ethical deconstruction and selfovercoming. I use Heraclitus, in whom they share an interest, as a lens for understanding their similar accounts of becoming, and use Aurobindo’s essay “Beyond Good and Evil” to examine their similar views on supraethics and overcoming. I conclude by addressing the affinity of līlā and the Will to Power: unifying theories meant to give renewed meaning to life in the modern age.
1. Metaphysical Affirmation Nietzsche and Aurobindo each inherit a tradition broadly regarded as illusionist and
131 worlddenying. Nietzsche rejects Schopenhauerian pessimism and demands optimism and vitality, while Aurobindo pushes against a particular reading of Śaṅkara to demand a vision of life itself as divine. Nietzsche and Aurobindo each endorse two basic forms of metaphysical affirmation. First, instead of rejecting the multiplicity and constant change of the world of appearance in favor of a unified, unchanging essence, they embrace these empirical qualities. The second metaphysical claim is more complex: Aurobindo and Nietzsche each argue, through their renditions of līlā and the Will to Power, respectively, that through unfolding and overcoming, the world is constantly affirming itself and taking a kind of delight in its many forms. Aurobindo describes līlā as a process of lifeaffirmation: In all that is developed by the lifeforce there is developed at the same time a secret delight somewhere in the being, a delight in good and a delight in evil, a delight in truth and a delight in falsehood, a delight in life and an attraction to death, a delight in pleasure and a delight in pain, in one’s own suffering and the suffering of others, but also in one’s own joy and happiness and good and the joy and happiness and good of others.289
Though Nietzsche refuses to give the Will to Power consciousness, he certainly describes it in terms of qualities a conscious being might have: the Will to Power is continually striving to overcome, driving towards growth, and always “affirming itself in this uniformity of its courses and its years, blessing itself.”290 Ethically, Aurobindo and Nietzsche each encourage these attitudes in human beings. For each, a metaphysical affirmation justifies an ethical affirmation: taking the world of humans to be valuable in its own right, and embracing the experience of human life while, at
289 Aurobindo, The Life Divine, 645. 290 Nietzsche, WP 3:1067
132 the same time, constantly attempting to transcend it by embodying a new kind of humanity. For each, this process involves the overcoming of old values imposed by ego and society. There are obvious differences in their views. Most importantly, Aurobindo maintains his belief in the divinity of the world, and insists Brahman is transcendent as well as immanent. There is also no “chaos” in Aurobindo’s philosophy. His metaphysical system unfolds in elaborately detailed taxonomies, while Nietzsche considers the world to be fundamentally chaotic and disorganized. Examining their modes of engagement with Heraclitus illuminates the most basic difference between the two: Nietzsche attempts to eliminate being, and Aurobindo attempts to maintain it. Here again, we will see that Nietzsche focuses on deconstruction and Aurobindo on reconciliation, but when we untangle how each defines “being,” we find more agreement between the two than one might expect. Aurobindo and Nietzsche each counted Heraclitus as a philosophical predecessor. Nietzsche saw Heraclitus as an ally in the battle against the rigidity and illusionism of other Greek thinkers. While the Socratics distorted the world by trying to make it conform to reason, Nietzsche’s Heraclitus was intuitive and true to the senses. In Twilight of the Idols, he writes, When the rest of the philosophic folk rejected the testimony of the senses because they showed multiplicity and change, he rejected their testimony because they showed things as if they had permanence and unity. […] What we make of their testimony, that alone introduces lies; for example, the lie of unity, the lie of thinghood, of substance, of permanence . . . "Reason” is the cause of our falsification of the testimony of the senses. Insofar as the senses show becoming, passing away, and change, they do not lie.291
291 Nietzsche, TI “Reason,” 2
133 Nietzsche paints his Heraclitus as a sensuous thinker who received knowledge empirically. Aurobindo also celebrates Heraclitus’ intuitionism. His discussion of Heraclitus seems to have been inspired by an essay by R. D. Ranade.292 Aurobindo’s slim volume argues that Heraclitus should be considered a part of the mystic tradition, and interweaves explanations of Heraclitus with comparative references to the Vedic tradition of exercising what Phillips calls “mystic empiricism.”293 Aurobindo and Nietzsche each draw on the movements of Heraclitus’ eternal fire as an inspiration for their concept of the world of becoming as artistic play. As I emphasized in the previous chapter, Nietzsche certainly characterizes the Will to Power’s constant becoming along the lines of Heraclitus. He describes, at once, Heraclitus’ world and his own: In this world only the play of artists and children exhibits becoming and passing away, building and destroying, without any moral additive, in forever equal innocence. And as artists and children play, so plays the everliving fire, building up and destroying, in innocence. Such is the game that the aeon plays with itself. [ . . . It] builds towers of sand like a child at the seashore, piling them up and trampling them down. From time to time it starts the game anew. A moment of satiety, and again it is seized by its need, as the artist is seized by the need to create. Not hybris but the evernewlyawakened impulse to play calls new worlds into being.294
Nietzsche is not alone here. Aurobindo’s language of Līlā—of fire, eternal strife, children playing—echoes Heraclitus as well as Indian traditions. The clearest metaphysical dissonance between Aurobindo and Nietzsche is illuminated
292
Ranade, “Herakleitos.” On page 3, Ranade calls Heraclitus “a veritable firebreathing philosopher like his later compeer—Nietzsche.” 293 Phillips, Aurobindo’s Philosophy of Brahman. 294 Nietzsche, PTA 7
134 by their differing interpretations of Heraclitus in respect to the possibility of Being. Aurobindo sees Heraclitus as an ally in reconciling Being and Becoming, while Nietzsche sees him as an ally in excising Being altogether. Aurobindo uses Heraclitus against the māyāvādins and their notion of an eternally still, sleeping Brahman, emphasizing that Heraclitus differs “from Anaximander who like our Mayavadins denied true reality to the Many” in that Heraclitus “believed unity and multiplicity to be both of them real and coexistent.”295 With this move, he recruits Heraclitus to the side of līlā. At the same time, his project remains integral: he disagrees with Ranade’s interpretation of Heraclitus as a philosopher of Becoming only, “—like Nietzsche, like the Buddhists.”296 Heraclitus might contain Aurobindo’s most sophisticated critique of Nietzsche. He praises Nietzsche as a true disciple of Heraclitus, arguing that his vivacity and suggestiveness is matched only by “Heraclitus among the early Greeks,” because Nietzsche “founded his whole philosophical thought on this conception of existence as a vast Willtobecome and of the world as a play of Force; divine Power was to him the creative Word, the beginning of all things and that to which life aspires.”297 Aurobindo gets Nietzsche exactly right, and in his praise, he compares Nietzsche to himself. But Aurobindo, the integralist, laments that Nietzsche …Affirms Becoming and excludes Being from his view of things; hence his philosophy is in the end unsatisfactory, insufficient, lopsided; it stimulates, but solves nothing. Heraclitus does not exclude Being from the data of the problem of existence, although he will not make any opposition or gulf
295 Aurobindo, Heraclitus, 11. 296 Ibid., 16. 297 Ibid., 13.
135 between that and Becoming.298 Aurobindo is quite right to point out that Nietzsche takes a different view of Heraclitus’ philosophy. Like Aurobindo, Nietzsche offers an interpretation that mirrors his own metaphysical beliefs. He says of Heraclitus that: He no longer distinguished a physical world from a metaphysical one, a realm of definite qualities from an undefinable "indefinite." And after this first step. nothing could hold him back from a second. far bolder negation: he altogether denied being. For this one world which he retained supported by eternal unwritten laws, flowing up ward and downward in brazen rhythmic beat nowhere shows a tarrying, an indestructibility, a bulwark in the stream. 299
Similarly, he puts it this way towards the end of his career, in Twilight of the Idols: “Heraclitus will remain eternally right with his assertion that being is an empty fiction. The "apparent" world is the only one: the "true" world is only added by a lie.”300 Their respective discussions of Heraclitus presents an opportunity distinguish what Nietzsche and Aurobindo say they are doing from what they actually do. They each offer viable interpretations of Heraclitus, seeing that Heraclitus erases the distinction between being and becoming. Nietzsche goes one step further to say that this move entails the erasure of being. While he rejects “being” by rejecting transcendence, stasis, and oneness, Nietzsche’s Will to Power is an underlying law that governs existence. When Aurobindo claims to maintain being in his system, he actually suggests something closer to this underlying law, since for him being is not transcendental (despite that
298 Ibid. 299 Nietzsche, PTA 5 300 Nietzsche, TI “Reason,” 2
136 the world extends beyond our view). This similarity becomes clearer when Aurobindo actually points out that Nietzsche is unable to excise being completely: “Nietzsche denied Being, but had to speak of a universal Willtobe; which again, when you come to think of it, seems to be no more than a translation of the Upanishadic tapo Brahma, WillEnergy is Brahman.”301 Here, Aurobindo compares Nietzsche’s philosophy to the Indian tradition. He also compares his own interpretation of Brahman to Nietzsche’s Will to Power, by characterizing it as “Willenergy.” While Aurobindo’s Brahman is characterized by being, it is not a static being; not a removed being. Brahman is real, immanent, and constantly in flux, like the Will to Power. Aurobindo’s Heraclitus maintains the Being of the world because, as Aurobindo puts it, “his cosmos has still an eternal basis, a unique original principle.” 302 The Will to Power, of course, is an eternal basis—a unique original principle that comprises and organizes all there is. One might say of Nietzsche’s theory of becoming represents precisely what Aurobindo says of Heraclitus’: if Heraclitus were truly positing nothingness beyond the world of appearance, it is difficult to see why he would seek for an original and eternal principle, the everliving Fire which creates all by its per perpetual changing, governs all by its fiery force of the “thunderbolt”, resolves all back into itself by a cyclic conflagration… unless it is maintained that all should not be reduced to “Nothing.”303
301 Aurobindo, Heraclitus, 23. 302 . p. 17 303 Aurobindo, Heraclitus, 23.
137 Nietzsche and Aurobindo reconcile being and becoming in similar ways. Though Aurobindo believes Brahman extends far beyond the world of appearance, the part of his metaphysical picture that consists of Brahman’s manifestation—Brahman’s līlā—is quite like Nietzsche’s metaphysical picture. Both of these worlds are characterized by constant becoming, which unfolds according to a fundamental law. In Nietzsche’s case, this law is the Will to Power; in Aurobindo’s case, it is the play of līlā. The Will to Power is, in the end, a force to which the world can be completely reduced, while līlā is a description of what Brahman is doing when it, the player, manifests as both the play and the playground. Despite the fact that they present the ordinary world and its movements similarly, Aurobindo accuses Nietzsche of maintaining “being.” This may be unfair. While it is fair to say that Nietzsche’s “eternal law” constitutes a kind of being, Nietzsche completely excises the notion of the beyond. And Aurobindo is committed to a very similar framework: in the empirical world, he claims, Brahman is manifest; nonetheless, seen from a higher vantage point, he argues, Brahman is extends beyond the phenomenal world. As we saw in previous chapters, Aurobindo’s Brahman is constantly rearranging itself and cycling through a series of evolutionary stages, constantly unfolding into multiplicity and then retreating to the repose of stillness. Nietzsche’s world also cycles through evolutionary phases. Like Aurobindo’s world, it struggles out of the simplest forms striving toward the most complex, out of the stillest, most rigid, coldest forms toward the hottest, most turbulent, most selfcontradictory, and then again returning home to the simple out of this abundance, out of the play of contradictions back to the joy of concord.304
304 Nietzsche, WP 3:1067
138 Aurobindo and Nietzsche also both describe evolutionary processes driven by delight in destruction in overcoming obstacles. Heraclitus may have influenced both Nietzsche and Aurobindo in this respect. Aurobindo calls Heraclitus, “the first thinker to see the world entirely in the terms of Power.”305 For each, emphasizing that existence is involved in a particular activity gives it a sense of meaning, and wrests valuation of existence away from the nihilists and pessimists who argue that the empirical world is without purpose. To further secure their worldviews from lifenegating traditions, they emphasize that all aspects of existence are characterized not by suffering, but by delight. Each also attempts to accommodate the fact of biological evolution by positing that the metaphysical world is constantly struggling towards higher states.
3. Ethical Affirmation According to both Nietzsche and Aurobindo, lifeaffirmation is he positive content of an ethics beyond good and evil. Instead of denying the value of the empirical world, they each believe human beings should actively engage with the projects of ordinary life, given that on a metaphysical level, existence is always already engaged in selfaffirmation. For each, the ethical affirmation of life entails engagement, rather than disengagement. In this project, each responds to what he describes as a politically and culturally decadent society that has denied the worth of existence in the conventional world, and suggests that in order to fully engage with life, one must overcome limitations of the self, and of dominant moral systems that arose out of lifenegating tendencies.
305 Aurobindo, Heraclitus, 36–37.
139 Nietzsche and Aurobindo each pit themselves against the same enemies: pessimistic nihilism and asceticism. Their discussions of nihilism are parallel. (Aurobindo refers to it as “the Nihil.”) Each argues that metaphysical nihilism entails that the world we perceive is ontologically inferior to a transcendental reality, and the consequent ethical nihilism entails that ordinary life is meaningless. Nietzsche rejects metaphysical nihilism, on the grounds that there is no transcendent reality to which it is inferior. He also rejects the view that ethical principles are transcendent, but also on those grounds rejects ethical nihilism on the grounds that life has immanent meaning. The passive nihilists, he argues, are therefore wrong to think either that the absence of transcendent ethical values deprive us of meaning. Active nihilists, he argues, who see the dawn of opportunity to create new values, have the right idea. Aurobindo argues that if metaphysical nihilism were true, it would be disastrous, but that metaphysical nihilism is not true, because Brahman gives the world meaning. (We might recall his horror that man could be “only an insect crawling […] amid the appalling immensities of the physical universe.”306) Despite that the presence of Brahman in Aurobindo’s system distinguishes it from Nietzsche’s, their arguments are nonetheless structurally analogous, given that Aurobindo’s Brahman is not distinct from reality. For each, values are immanent, and the possibility of creative revaluation promises a liberated future. Nietzsche gives authority to the individual in this process, however, while Aurobindo sees Brahman as the creative agent. Nietzsche and Aurobindo each argue that that ascetics—who try to divest from life—fail to understand what is demanded of one who wants to improve the prospects of
306 Aurobindo, The Life Divine, 46.
140 humankind. Instead of turning away from life, as the ascetic does, Nietzsche and Aurobindo advocate engagement with ordinary life. So: Aurobindo and Nietzsche disagree over the source of value, but they agree that a nihilistic attitude is deplorable. They agree that it is wrong to count mundane life as futile and turn away from it like the ascetic. Each presents a narrative of the devolution of his respective culture from a past “Golden Age,” each finds his nation mired in a state of cultural decadence. Nietzsche’s Germany is closing its eyes to life, giving it up for lost and looking to daydreams of the divine or the “ideal” instead. He imagines that European culture is full of sickness and weakness, plagued by passive nihilism, bad conscience and selfloathing. Aurobindo sees India as suffering under a period of long decline, culminating in subjugation by the English, who have characterized the nation as merely spiritual, merely metaphysical, and ultimately weak. He wants to “reclaim” the association between Indians and robust activity in the social, political, and natural world. More, he has spent a political career attempting to militarize Indians into a sense of nationalism, but sees no revolutionary inspiration in the idea that the world of our experience is nothing more than māyā. Māyā is an inconvenient idea for anticolonial struggle. Nietzsche and Aurobindo are trying to cure not only a philosophical pessimism, but also a cultural pessimism. Nietzsche and Aurobindo are able to suggest total revaluation because they each maintain that conventional ethics are socially constructed. Nietzsche is famous for his claim that humanity should aim “beyond good and evil,” divesting radically from his own tradition and from the church. Although Aurobindo’s skepticism about ethics is a less pressing agenda, he too pushes against his own tradition. Part of his lifeaffirmation entails that “animal”
141 instincts be affirmed and integrated willingly into the human psyche. He argues that all moral systems will fail, because they will never be able to account for the infinite complexity and profusion of existence. Instead, he argues that Brahman is totally beyond ethics, and that the only human duty (though perhaps not even a duty for all people, all the time) is to transcend the bounds of convention to realize one’s divinity. Nietzsche and Aurobindo each take a crosscultural view on supraethics. Nietzsche may have been a source for Aurobindo’s ethical thought. Aurobindo selfconsciously references explicitly refers to Nietzsche by titling an essay “Beyond Good and Evil.” That his next essay is titled “The Divine Superman” also indicates that Aurobindo had Nietzsche in mind when he wrote it. In this “Beyond Good and Evil,” he claims, God is beyond good and evil, not below them, not existing and limited by them, not even above them, but in a more absolute sense excedent and transcendent of the ideas of good and evil. He exceeds them in his universality; they exist in him, but the values of good and evil which we give to things is not their divine or universal value, they are only their practical value created by us in our psychological and dynamic dealings with life.307
Aurobindo also prescribes that humanity “must transcend good and evil.”308 Aurobindo uses that Nietzschean phrase to indicate his agreement that subscribing to moral systems holds human beings back from seeing beyond convention and so inhibits their spiritual growth. Aurobindo mentions “the absolute good,” and this, at first, might indicate that he believes in a divine moral ideal after all: but this is not the case. Reading closely, it becomes clear that this “absolute good” is not good in a moral sense at all.309 Saccidānanda is a good of a very 307 Aurobindo, Essays Divine and Human: Writings from Manuscripts 19101950, 148. 308 Ibid. 309 Aurobindo, The Life Divine, 618–650.
142 different kind: it is the definition of absolute good, but it is totally beyond human qualities. The play of līlā manifests Brahman’s joy in transcending boundaries by tying and later untangling “knots of matter.” The Will to Power is a drive to overcome limitations that underlies all processes. Nietzsche and Aurobindo each exhibit an evolutionary urge, imagining humanity as an intermediate point. They each assert that humanity will someday move beyond the mere human by overcoming humanity as it is, and each accepts the need for violence, destruction, and dominance as part of this process. To overcome, after all, is to dominate. Aurobindo agrees with Nietzsche here, comparing the process of worldevolution to war: In that slow and difficult emergence a certain semblance of truth is given to the dictum of Heraclitus that War is the father of all things; for each idea, force, separate consciousness, living being by the very necessity of its ignorance enters into collision with others and tries to live and grow and fulfil itself by independent selfassertion, not by harmony with the rest of existence. Yet there is still the unknown underlying Oneness which compels us to strive slowly towards some form of harmony, of interdependence, of concording of discords, of a difficult unity. 310
Aurobindo concedes that much of the evolution of Brahman is wrought by “selfassertion, not by harmony,” as part of the process of achieving unity. Destruction and creation go hand in hand. For Nietzsche, of course, there is never a respite: the struggle continues perpetually with no repose in saccidānanda. According to both Nietzsche and Aurobindo, selfovercoming—or the overcoming of the ego—is the most important human goal. Each imagines a kind of transhuman ideal by
310 Ibid., 299.
143 this name. Aurobindo develops his version of the superman in opposition to what he understands to be Nietzsche’s superman, absolutely resisting “idea of a forceful domination over humanity by the superman,” which he takes to be “a supermanhood of the Nietzschean type.” 311 He considers the Übermensch a fully and foully human creature, worrying that “Any attempt to heighten inordinately the mental or exaggerate inordinately the vital man, — a Nietzschean supermanhood, for example, — can only colossalise the human creature, it cannot transform or divinise him.”312 Most of his writing on the superman is devoted to criticizing this “Nietzschean” view, against which he ultimately suggests this alternative: What has to emerge is something much more difficult and much more simple; it is a selfrealised being, a building of the spiritual self, an intensity and urge of the soul and the deliverance and sovereignty of its light and power and beauty, — not an egoistic supermanhood seizing on a mental and vital domination over humanity, but the sovereignty of the Spirit over its own instruments, its possession of itself and its possession of life in the power of the spirit, a new consciousness in which humanity itself shall find its own selfexceeding and selffulfillment by the revelation of the divinity that is striving for birth within it. This is the sole true supermanhood and the one real possibility of a step forward in evolutionary Nature.313 This vision of a morethanhuman being who has transcended the ego, who has mastered life, who overflows with force and lives in “light and power and beauty,”—this, Aurobindo would be surprised to discover, is also the most appropriate interpretation of the Nietzschean Übermensch. Nietzsche did not envision an authoritarian human bestriding the earth and crushing
311 Ibid., 1104. 312 Ibid., 750. 313 Ibid., 1104.
144 the weak. His vision was of something beyond the merely human: a being who had thoroughly mastered the constant challenge of selfovercoming by coming to understand that the human is more than a limited ego. Nietzsche writes, “We are more than the individuals: we are the whole chain as well, with the tasks of all the futures of that chain.” 314 He makes clear that the Übermensch is something more than human—and that to be human is to have the potential to transcend mere humanity. The following passage of Nietzsche’s could have been written by Aurobindo : Man hitherto as it were, an embryo of the man of the future; all the formgiving forces directed toward the latter are present in the former […]. This is the profoundest conception of suffering: the form giving forces are in painful collision. The isolation of the individual ought not to deceive us: something flows on underneath individuals. That the individual feels himself isolated is itself the most powerful goad in the process towards the most distant goals: his search for his happiness is the means that holds together and moderates the formgiving forces, so they do not destroy themselves.315 Nietzsche’s conception that we are not truly isolated because “something flows underneath individuals” reveals his commitment to the solubility of the human ego into a broader conception of the self as part of a larger flow of becoming: the Will to Power. Just as to become Aurobindo’s superman, an individual must identify his soul with Brahman and the process of his body and life as Brahman’s līlā, to become Nietzsche’s Übermensch one must identify with the Will to Power. Aurobindo’s critique of Nietzsche’s superman may be put in its best light by taking a broad view on the role of the individual in a failed collective society. Nietzsche and
314 Nietzsche, WP 3:687 315 Nietzsche, WP 3:686
145 Aurobindo each accepted the dominant view that human society moves inevitably through different phases. In this case, Nietzsche was in sense more radical than Aurobindo in attempting to thoroughly reject the idea of “progress” as modern nonsense. For Nietzsche, the Übermensch is the endall: the ultimate goal of the evolution of human society. He is a cynic about utopianism, asserting that all societal organizations will inevitably evolve higher and lower types and hoping some will produce more of the higher. To conflate the Übermensch with the violent aristocrats of the Genealogy is a mistake—but while Nietzsche’s Übermensch is not a political creature, Nietzsche certainly expressed pleasure in the aristocratic type. Nietzsche’s political philosophy was not necessarily at odds with the colonial project, given its emphasis on the domination of the weak by the strong. 316 Aurobindo’s work, on the other hand, cannot be viewed apart from the colonial encounter. While Nietzsche defends the superiority of certain individuals in contrast to the masses, Aurobindo’s radical call to eradicate “objective egoism” is meant to eliminate the category of “other.” He investigates both the evolution of the individual and the evolution of collective society, concluding that the modernity surrounding him was the age of “individualism,” which he believed led to the kind of racism that made the Holocaust possible.317 Aurobindo pointed out that the theories of 316 This is not to deny the broad anticolonial application of his theory. For many, Nietzsche’s
revolt against the history of Western thought—his destruction of morality as a fixed dualistic structure and his refusal of the notion of any ontological “essence”—was occasion for optimism. If human nature is not fixed, and values are subject to invention and destruction, it is possible to kick the legs out from under white supremacist ideological structures, for instance. Though Nietzsche’s work and legacy is complex and troubled, his deconstructionist critiques have lent themselves well to postcolonial theorists like, for example, Franz Fanon, who drew from Nietzsche’s ontological deconstruction and political critique of ressentiment in one of his philosophical masterpieces, Black Skin, White Masks. Franz Fanon. Black Skin, White Masks. trans. Richard Wilcox. New York: Grove, 2008. Print. p. 197. 317 Aurobindo, The Human Cycle and the Ideal of Human Unity, 15–18.
146 egoism, individualism, and superiority—“the theory of inferior and decadent races” dominated European thinking in regards to their treatment of “Asiatic and African peoples,” and that the only innovation of the Nazis was to impose this way of thinking on other Europeans.318 Despite his deconstruction of the self vs. world dichotomy, Nietzsche remains attached to the idea of the “other”—the “bad” herd against which the “happy few” can define themselves. This, perhaps, is an indication of their respective positions in the colonial world.
3: The Meaning of Life: Will to Power and līlā Nietzsche and Aurobindo each move from the metaphysical to the ethical because each sees human life in a continuum with a more universal process. They each view conventional morality as a framework to be overcome and each understands positive ethics as a naturalistic striving for transcendence. Each sees reality as constantly becoming, as opposed to stasis. Nietzsche interprets this becoming as the constant surging of the Will to Power. Aurobindo sees becoming as Brahman’s līlā: the play of existence. The Will to Power is a force, while līlā is an activity, but each is a principle to which existence can be reduced. The Will to Power and līlā are each completely transmoral—the delight and affirmation of līlā and the Will are aesthetic and ecstatic. They are beyond good and evil; they indicate that the evolution towards higher states involve the repeated overcoming human values and ego. Nietzsche’s Will to Power is driven constantly to overcome and overpower in order to discharge and enlarge its strength. Aurobindo’s līlā is the delight of overcoming stages of complexity. In each case, human
318 Ibid., 56.
147 beings constitute the flux of the Will to Power; no more than līlā. Līlā and the Will to Power are each supraethical processes of creative play and selfaffirmation that constitute and explain our existence. They give life meaning. Each theory has roots in Heraclitian philosophy: Nietzsche asserts “that all driving force is will to power, that there is no other physical, dynamic or psychic force except this,” and Aurobindo asserts that every process within Brahman’s manifested existence is līlā. 319 Both forces are driven by aesthetic ecstasy in their own unfolding. These affinities reflect more than a coincidental parallel between two unique philosophical theories—they actually teach us something about an intercontinental philosophical conversation. The similar engagements of these disparate philosophers reflect the beginnings of a broader response to some of the problematic attitudes of modernity as articulated in distinct but connected regions. Nietzsche and Aurobindo respond to an idealistic denial of the reality of the empirical world. Nietzsche and Aurobindo each offer a realistic, naturalistic, and hence ̛ modern remedy ̛ for a modern melancholy arising from the threat of science and the pessimism of idealism and secularism. In their robust defenses of the reality of a world of becoming, they show that what was considered mere appearance is actually reality, and that what appears to be devoid of value is in fact the only possible locus of value. They propose that the meaning of life is to be found in artistic play and sublime aesthetic joy, emphasizing that this play is immanent in existence and is always open to us. They each suggest a human program of striving to transcend every limit. These optimistic proposals, as Zarathustra puts it, are “gifts unto men,”
319 Nietzsche, WP 3:688
148 aimed at bringing Germany and India out of “decadence” into a new renaissance or renascence. 320 Nietzsche’s and Aurobindo’s shared aim is to embolden and empower humanity against the dogma of Enlightenment thinking and the authority of the cultural elites, and also against nihilistic pessimistic malaise. Aurobindo and Nietzsche can be seen as local instances of a broad movement towards a renewed affirmation of life. Nietzsche went into the Western philosophical canon swinging, and problematized many ideas Europeans had taken for granted. He began a slow avalanche that brought down many of the foundational tenets of modernity. Beliefs in an ideal, noumenal realm, in the illusoriness of the ordinary world, and in the pointlessness of human life have fallen completely out of fashion. In India, Aurobindo catalyzed a shift away from illusionism and pessimism, and solidified the Neovedānta philosophy as one that does not, in the end, deny the reality of the natural world—and Aurobindianinflected Advaita Vedānta is now the most popular iteration of Indian philosophy. Aurobindo’s revaluation of advaita vedānta to include “the affirmation of a divine life upon earth” made it simple to bring a new, realistidealism to the fore as a lifeaffirming, vital philosophy that could support a revolutionary movement. 321 Aurobindo did not invent līlā, but he repurposed it to revitalize Advaita Vedānta in the modern age; to make life—here and now—divine, and to make it worth fighting for. Bhushan and Garfield put it nicely: Līlā is not new to India. But there is Līlā and Līlā.”322 We have more to learn from these parallel moves. From the way Nietzsche and
320 Nietzsche, Z I:1 321 Aurobindo, The Life Divine, 8. 322 Nalini Bhushan and Jay L. Garfield, Indian Philosophy in English: From Renaissance to
Independence (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2011).
149 Aurobindo approached these problems and crafted their solutions, we learn that transcontinental discourse had a lot to offer the project of addressing philosophical problems even during this period. Their respective responses to modernity grew out of their careful attention to what there was to be learned from across the world. Nietzsche, who had an eye on India and educated himself about Indian philosophy, was nurtured as a philosopher by scholars who themselves had ingested a great deal of theory from India. If we take into account not only his fairly extensive reading of Eastern thought, but also his embeddedness in an intellectual culture that was obsessed with and shaped by orientalist renditions of Indian religion and philosophy, Nietzsche suddenly strides in step with the German Orientalists. They, like him, denounced Germany as decadent, undermined Eurocentrism, and advocated a return to origins. Aurobindo’s mystic, poetic, and philosophical project has its roots in an antiimperialist project, and the attempt to “Indianise” the best of European thought was never far from him. He relied on his Western education to use Advaita Vedānta as a means to help catalyze India’s resurgence—her evolution back into a higher state. Nietzsche and Aurobindo are not alone in their project of marshaling crosscultural resources to dispel certain problems of modernity. Many other characters in their story who have hovered on the periphery of this project have acted similarly: people like Schopenhauer, Deussen, Schelling, Emerson, Schlegel in the West and Vivekananda, Ranade, Mukerji, Iqbal, Tagore, and Ghandi in the East were also culling resources from around the world in the hopes of shaping a new future by returning to a Golden Age. Taken in context, we arrive at a vision of two iconoclastic, literary, mystical thinkers who rigorously analyzed the predicament of modern philosophy and culture in the local
150 iterations that surrounded them. Each culled from other traditions and arrived at a diagnosis of decadence and lifedenial. Where modern and classical idealisms failed to offer a reason to act rigorously and authentically in the face of oppressive ideals and practices, and where modern ethics were inflexible and based on an outdated metaphysical beyond, Aurobindo and Nietzsche constructed alternatives. Līlā and the Will to Power represent unifying theories that collapse the distinction between the real and the ideal and present existence as a supraethical process of creative play, constant change, and eternal selfaffirmation. These theories invite future thinkers to reimagine their interaction with the world: to leap into the sublime rush of life, prepared to overcome the bounds of ego, humanity, and history.
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