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020 smith (37-56) 10/27/04 12:48 PM Page 37 Nietzsche’s Hinduism, Nietzsche’s India: Another Look David Smith T his essay attempts a provocative overview of Nietzsche’s relationship with Hinduism and India.1 It is a reading that finds Nietzsche off balance and at a disadvantage, for its starting poi...

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Nietzsche’s Hinduism, Nietzsche’s India: Another Look David Smith

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his essay attempts a provocative overview of Nietzsche’s relationship with Hinduism and India.1 It is a reading that finds Nietzsche off balance and at a disadvantage, for its starting point is the fact that Nietzsche read the Laws of Manu [Manavadharmasastra]2—the one Indian text that really excited him— in a popular edition whose absurd annotation of the text gained Nietzsche’s credence. I refer to Louis Jacolliot’s French translation.3 Manu was a relatively well-known text in nineteenth-century Europe and Jacolliot was a popular and indeed notorious writer. Nietzsche’s choice of version shows, I suggest, ignorance of both scholarly and popular writing on India. I shall also consider Nietzsche’s relationship with other key Hindu texts and his other references to Hinduism and India. In line with the starting point of Jacolliot, my discussion continues mainly in the context of French writers contemporary with Nietzsche, particularly Ernest Renan, the hugely successful author of Vie de Jésus and Professor of Semitic Languages at the Collège de France, in some respects a triumphant alter ego of Nietzsche, being both philologist and wide-ranging thinker, though today their relative importance is reversed. I conclude with brief assessments of the eternal return and the Übermensch in relation to Hinduism, and with a look at Nietzsche’s own India, as distinct from his Hinduism.

Nietzsche, Jacolliot, and Manu In Nietzsche’s day there was considerable academic and popular interest in India and the religion of the majority of its inhabitants. Louis Jacolliot was not only a translator of Manu but also was a major popularizer of Hinduism and India. After the first flush of Enlightenment and then Romantic enthusiasm, European writing on India had become unfavorable to Hindus and Hinduism. Jacolliot’s extreme enthusiasm for early Hinduism and with what seemed to be long and wide experience of contemporary India was a more or less unique combination, and for a while a winning one. 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, notwithstanding that they were the product of the imagination of a silly man. It Journal of Nietzsche Studies, Issue 28, 2004 Copyright ©2004 The Friedrich Nietzsche Society.

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is bizarre to juxtapose Nietzsche with Jacolliot, the now immensely famous intellect with the forgotten fraud, but the juxtaposition arises from Nietzsche’s acquisition and reading of Jacolliot’s book. In Jacolliot’s favor is the fact that he did know something about India, whereas Nietzsche is primarily an expert on himself, and the world as seen in the mirror of himself, his work “a bible for the solitary man.”4 Jacolliot’s India of occultism and dancing girls is the real thing misunderstood and embroidered by his imagination; Nietzsche’s India is based on Nietzsche. Marcel Conche said, “‘Nietzsche and Buddhism,’” which “means: “‘Nietzsche and Buddhism’ as he wishes to see it”5—so too Nietzsche and Hinduism. Both Hinduism and Buddhism are of interest to Nietzsche not in themselves but as alternative positions from which to continue his attack on Christianity. Nietzsche declares that “the critic of Christianity is profoundly grateful to the students of India” for making Buddhism available as a religion to compare with Christianity.6 It may fairly be assumed that Nietzsche felt a similar gratitude in respect of the availability of Hinduism. Buddhism, as a pessimistic and decadent religion for Nietzsche, resembles Christianity “but is a hundred times [. . .] more truthful, more objective” (A 23). Hinduism is an affirmative religion rather than a negative one like Buddhism and Christianity, but, like Buddhism, it is a product of the ruling orders (KSA 13:14[195]/WP 154).7 Nietzsche seldom referred to Hinduism; nor did he use the word Hinduism, speaking rather of Brahmanism, the Vedanta, or Indian philosophy. However, the only extensive Indian text that he chose unprompted to read for himself was a central text of Hinduism not relating to philosophy, namely, Louis Jacolliot’s version of the Laws of Manu. A valuable account of the defects of Jacolliot’s book has been given by Ann-Marie Etter. However, the question needs to be considered more widely. That Nietzsche read Jacolliot’s Manu with enthusiasm is astonishing, but no less remarkable are the implications for the state of his previous knowledge of Hinduism and India. Misunderstanding has been aggravated by the fact that Louis Jacolliot, still a well-known figure at the time of his death in 1890, quickly faded away into deserved oblivion. For long it was thought simply that Nietzsche read the Laws of Manu in translation and was excited by them. Thus even Wendy Doniger and Brian K. Smith in the 1991 Penguin translation of the Laws of Manu, when mentioning what they admit is his “extraordinary interpretation of the text,” remark in a footnote that “presumably, Nietzsche knew Hüttner’s 1797 German translation.”8 However, it has been known from the publication of the Colli and Montinari edition of Nietzsche that Nietzsche uses Jacolliot’s Manu. It is one of the books he possessed, and it shows marks of attentive reading. He refers to Jacolliot by name in one of his notebooks, and sometimes gives page numbers with the extracts that he translates into German. No other Indian text excited Nietzsche in this way. There is no record of his having read through any other

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Indian text entirely on his own initiative. He looked at books about Hinduism and Buddhism, but as Renan said, for a philologist there is nothing more important than reading original texts.9 Of course, with The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche had left philology behind him; but he still lays claim to a philologist’s style of reading, as in Daybreak: “slowly, deeply, looking cautiously before and aft, with reservations” (D P5).10 But this is the way he wants to be read, not the way that he reads other people. The way that Nietzsche writes to Heinrich Köselitz (Peter Gast) about his discovery of Manu (31 May 1888) calls for the careful reading Nietzsche would want for his published work: I owe to these last weeks a very important lesson: I found Manu’s book of laws in a French translation done in India under strict supervision from the most eminent priests and scholars there. This absolutely Aryan work, a priestly codex of morality based on the Vedas, on the idea of caste and very ancient (uralten) tradition—not pessimistic, albeit very sacerdotal—supplements my views on religion in the most remarkable way. I confess to having the impression that everything else that we have by way of moral lawgiving seems to me an imitation and even a caricature of it—preeminently, Egypticism does; but even Plato seems to me in all the main points simply to have been well instructed by a Brahmin. It makes the Jews look like a Chandala race which learns from its masters the principles of making a priestly caste the master which organices a people. The Chinese also seem to have produced their Confucius and Lao-Tse under the influence of this ancient classic of laws. The medieval organization looks like a wondrous groping for a restoration of all the ideas which formed the basis of primordial (uralte) Indian-Aryan society—but with pessimistic values which have their origin in the soil of racial décadence. Here too, the Jews seem to be merely transmitters—they invent nothing.11

It is not entirely clear from Nietzsche’s phrasing here whether or not he had previously heard of Manu. As we shall see, he certainly had; but the contents of Manu’s book seem new to him. He is not simply explaining to Gast what he thought Gast might not have known, since he begins his account of the Laws of Manu, “I owe to these last weeks a very important lesson [Belehrung].” He must mean here either the contents of Manu’s law book were new to him, or Jacolliot’s interpretation was new to him. Either reading is devastating to any claim to merit in Nietzsche’s understanding of Hinduism. Nietzsche in this letter clearly takes on board Jacolliot’s absurd claim that Manu is the ultimate source of all law codes, and even more absurdly, with no relation whatsoever to the Indian text, that the Semitic peoples were in origin Hindu outcastes (chandalas). Nietzsche participates in Jacolliot’s project by adding China to the list of countries whose laws go back to Manu. What was Nietzsche doing learning a lesson from Manu in 1888? Today, even a cursory reading of Schwab’s Renaissance Orientale shows how widely Manu was known and discussed in Europe from 1794, the date of Sir William Jones’s translation—a work that won him a statue in St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, his

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hand resting on the great tome of Manu—right up to the end of the nineteenth century.12 It would be fair to say that no single text is more important for understanding Hinduism than the Laws of Manu; and of Indian texts probably only Kalidasa’s play Sakuntala was more widely read in nineteenth-century Europe. Max Müller had declared decades earlier that, “Instead of the Veda, the Brahmans of the present day read the Laws of Manu.”13 No less than four other European translations were available at the time Nietzsche read Jacolliot.14 Nietzsche’s varied reading about Hinduism and Buddhism would have made at least the name of Manu and his law book familiar. In 1865 a student at Bonn, Nietzsche’s notes on Schaarschmidt’s lecture course on the general history of philosophy include a reference to the Laws of Manu.15 Koeppen in his book on the religion of the Buddha gives detailed references to Manu, and discusses Manu’s treatment of chandalas;16 Nietzsche borrowed Koeppen from the university library in Basel in 1870. Thomas Brobjer notes that Nietzsche added a reference to Manu to the index of Oldenberg’s Buddha, and suggests that this was done at the time Nietzsche was reading Jacolliot.17 However, if Nietzsche was hoping to find out more about Manu from Oldenberg, he looked in vain. Unlike Koeppen, Oldenberg has almost nothing to say about the Laws of Manu or indeed about caste. But almost every book on Indian religion mentioned Manu. In the words of Monier-Williams, professor of Sanskrit at Oxford, Manu was “certainly one of the most remarkable literary works that the world has ever produced.”18 The significance of Manu went beyond specialized Indological treatises. It is difficult to remember today how fresh and exciting Sanskrit texts were in nineteenth-century Europe. Schopenhauer, who quotes Manu twice in his Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, refers to it as “the oldest of all the codes of law.”19 Schopenhauer’s enthusiasm was widely shared. To take only major figures in contemporary French writing, the following instances may be noted. Renan, like Nietzsche, a philologist by training—though he never abandoned philology—refers to Manu: four times, for example, in his L’Avenir de la science.20 Another up-to-date and forward-looking writer like Guyau (1854–88) in his L’Irréligion de l’avenir, a book in Nietzsche’s library, refers to Manu.21 Even Victor Hugo’s novel Notre-dame de Paris (1831) set in the Middle Ages refers to the Laws of Manu. For those who had eyes to see, who did not refuse to see India, Manu was everywhere.

Jacolliot’s India In 1985 Ann-Marie Etter took a careful look at Jacolliot’s translation and showed how it departs from the received text of Manu.22 The text Jacolliot was working from is not now available; he claimed that it was based on the ancient version of Manu, preserved, as he thought, in southern India. According to

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Jacolliot’s reading of his version of Manu, the ancient Near East was populated by outcastes who had freed themselves from Brahmin domination by emigrating from India. (Hence Nietzsche’s view in his letter to Peter Gast that the Jews were “a Chandala race which learns from its masters the principles of making a priestly caste the master which organizes a people.”)23 Etter briefly discussed Jacolliot’s life, quoting the Grande Encyclopédie (Paris, 1885–1902) to the effect that he was a judge in the French colonies, in Pondichery, Chandernagore, and later Tahiti and that “in his long stay in India [he] collected a quantity of materials which enabled him to publish some very interesting works, but in them romanticism often predominates over scientific truth, so that he must be considered as a very brilliant vulgarizer rather than a scholar or historian.” Etter refers to two other of Jacolliot’s books, Le Spiritisme dans le Monde and Chrishna et Christna, and correctly dismisses him as an India-fanatic who thought that everything in human culture and spirituality had its origin in India. However, she is misled by Jacolliot’s own claims when she concedes that he must have known India well, that he must have been an “Indienkenner.”24 Caracostea’s valuable archival research published just a year ago has established that Jacolliot was in India for only twenty-seven months,25 a far cry from the twenty years’ residence recently credited to him by one French Indologist.26 Moreover, by only mentioning two other books by Jacolliot, Etter gives a very inadequate impression of his place in the literary scene. Jacolliot was even less authentic than she supposed and at the same time was far more prominent. His publications were numerous, including many books of travel writing and several novels. His translation of Manu was one of his series of Études Indianistes, comprising some thirteen volumes, republished as a handsomely bound complete set, which came to sit on the theosophist Madame Blavatsky’s bookshelf. Apart from portions of translations from modern Tamil plays, and passages taken from Max Müller, his Études Indianistes are worthless; however, they sold well. No less than ten of his travel books describe his experiences in India and Sri Lanka and several went into multiple editions. He was eagerly read by occultists—as the New Age enthusiasts of the day were called—and also by the general public. He might be characterized today as a combination of Dalrymple and Van Daniken, with an added element of sexual titillation. Performances by dancing girls and hints of sexual encounters are a constant backdrop to the travel books. There must be some truth underlying the accounts of his experiences, but ten books about the very limited period of his stay in the region, with at least some of his time taken up by official duties as magistrate, must mean that a considerable part was played by imagination. The only novel Jacolliot wrote about India, Le Coureur des Jungles, appeared the same year that Nietzsche discovered his Manu, 1888.27 When it is said of the French hero, the Jungle Hunter, “What was the date of his arrival in the land of the lotus? No one knows,”28 one cannot but be reminded of the mysterious

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and concealed length of Jacolliot’s stay in India. The novel is set in 1857–58, after the British had brutally put down what they called the Mutiny. The Jungle Hunter and his friends, “commissioned by the old Emperor in Delhi. . . had made war together again the English.”29 For ten years he had traversed the length and breadth of India, revolted by the rapacity of the British, and then managed to form, with Nana-Sahib, the vast conspiracy that resulted in the war against the invading British. One of the closing highlights of the novel has the Jungle Hunter, disguised as a fakir, hypnotize Sir John Lawrence, “placing on the head of the Viceroy his two hands charged with magnetic fluid; with his eyes equally pouring forth mysterious effluvia against which the Viceroy strained vainly to struggle.” The viceroy is made to believe himself an outcaste (pariah, or chandala) and then to walk like a dog. The Hunter loses self-control for a moment, such is the expenditure of magnetic fluid that he has made to control the other man. There was a “sort of counter shock. It is not rare in India to see fakirs gradually exalt themselves to madness when they struggle against a subject with a fluidic force superior to their own.”30 The novel ends with the Hunter sailing off with Nana Sahib for an unknown destination. Mysterious powers feature in one of the two other books of Jacolliot referred to by Etter, Le Spiritisme dans le Monde.31 This work falls into two parts. In the first, larger part, he gives an account of life-stages and of various types of yogi and renouncer, with passing references to an earlier technologically advanced civilization. The second part, often cited by occultists, is the account of his exeriences with a Hindu magician. Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, was very much impressed by this part of the book. Jacolliot, Doyle reports, found among the “native fakirs” “every phenomenon of advanced European mediumship”— “levitation of the body, the handling of fire, movement of articles at a distance, rapid growth of plants, raising of tables. Their explanation of these phenomena was that they were done by the Pitris or spirits, and their only difference in procedure from ours seemed to be that they made more use of direct evocation. They claimed that these powers were handed down from time immemorial and traced back to the Chaldees.”32 There is evidence that on his return in Paris in 1872, if not before, Jacolliot was a spiritualist and went in for table-turning.33 Nietzsche himself once went to a spiritualist séance. Beforehand he writes to Köselitz (2 October 1882), “This evening, a sensational manifestation of spiritualism at Leipzig, at the command of the spirits. They affirm that this séance will be very important for the history of spiritualism: that a personality will be invoked—in short, I must be present at it, and six people await agitatedly what I will say about it. But the best medium is in an advanced state of pregnancy. The spirits will make their apparition today, for instance the ‘Russian nun’ and the ‘child’. Two doctors will be present.” The next day, he writes that “spiritualism is a pitiful deception and, after the first half-hour, boring. And this Prof. Zöllner has let himself be cheated by this medium! Not a word more about it! I was expecting something else, and I had in advance provided myself with three

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fine theories, physiologico-psychologico-moral, but I didn’t have to use my theories at all.”34 Nietzsche’s reading in psychology and physiology bore no relation to Jacolliot’s murky world. Etter does not mention Jacolliot’s most famous and most significant book, La Bible dans l’Inde.35 La Bible sets the pattern for the rest of Jacolliot’s Indianist studies. We find an advocate pleading his cause in short high-pitched paragraphs, harangue that in its repetitions becomes a rant—India is the source of all civilization. It is true that a major historian, Michelet, was writing only three years earlier that “primeval India was the original cradle, the matrix of the world.”36 But Jacolliot sought to bolster his more extreme view by a naïve and uncritical reading of Sanskrit texts. Jacolliot elaborates his claim with copious extracts from Manu, sometimes with chapter and verse, more usually without. Manu is Jacolliot...