Nietzsche and Asian Thought
Nietzsche and Asian Thought is an anthology of essays by a variety of contributors on the relationship of the thought of German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche to Asian philosophy; specifically, Indian, Chinese and Japanese philosophy. The book was edited by the philosopher Graham Parkes and was released in 1991 by the University of Chicago Press. The work was written for a Western audience of Nietzsche scholars and comparative philosophers, but features contributions from non-Western thinkers.
The work is split into four sections—Others, India, China and Japan—and each section contains between three and four essays, for a total of 14 articles by 13 different authors. The work was well received by academic reviewers upon its release, and praised as a "must-read" for both Nietzsche scholars and comparative philosophers. In 2004, a special edition of The Journal of Nietzsche Studies was published, aiming to build upon the scholarship in Nietzsche and Asian Thought.
Concept and contributors
The essays contained in Nietzsche and Asian Thought were collected to illustrate both the influence that Asian philosophy had on Nietzsche, and the influence that Nietzsche's thought subsequently had on Asian schools. Despite the fact that published scholarship on Nietzsche had increased in the years preceding the appearance of the book, very little had been written on the relationship between Nietzsche's philosophy and Asian philosophy. Further, only a very small portion of works written in Western languages on Nietzsche had addressed the response his works had provoked in Asia, especially Japan, after his death. Nietzsche and Asian Thought was "intended as an initial contribution towards redressing imbalance", and all but two of the essays in the anthology were written specifically for it.Parkes wrote that the genre of the anthology is an appropriate one in which to write about Nietzsche, claiming that he is "above all a writer in many voices, and one problem with books written about his work is that they have been mainly 'monological,' with the author speaking in only one voice." He argues that justice is more likely to be done to Nietzsche's work when a multiplicity of perspectives is possible, and that Nietzsche and Asian Thought takes this idea further, with the inclusion of thinkers from East Asia as well as Europe. However, the work does not seek to recast Nietzsche as some kind of multicultural thinker, but instead serves to "complicate" our understanding of Nietzsche. One "significant absence" from the work is the work of Nishitani Keiji, a Japanese philosopher who lists Nietzsche as a major influence. Originally, Nietzsche and Asian Thought had been intended to contain a translation of an essay by Nishitani, first published in the 1930s, comparing Nietzsche's Zarathustra to Meister Eckhart, but considerations of time and space prevented this.
The work is targeted primarily at a Western audience and is written in English, with a number of essays translated from other languages. However, despite Parkes's efforts to make the anthology accessible, it can be difficult and dense in places, with heavy use of foreign terminology and enough names to "daunt the uninitiated". The inclusion of Asian perspectives enables Western scholars of Nietzsche to see new aspects of his thought, and the work is written to be of interest primarily to scholars of Nietzsche, but also those of comparative philosophy generally.
Content
The work contains 14 essays, split into four sections, covering Nietzsche's relationship to Asia and "others", Nietzsche and India, Nietzsche and China, and Nietzsche and Japan.Others
;"The orientation of the Nietzschean text";"The other Nietzsche"
;"Questioning one's 'own' from the perspective of the foreign"
India
;"Nietzsche's early encounters with Asian thought";"Nietzsche and the suffering of the Indian ascetic"
;"Nietzsche's trans-European eye"
;"Deconstruction and breakthrough in Nietzsche and Nāgārjuna"
China
;"Zhuang Zi and Nietzsche;"Nietzsche's 'will to power' and Chinese 'virtuality'
;"The highest Chinadom
Japan
;"The early reception of Nietzsche's philosophy in Japan";"Nietzsche's conception of nature from an east-Asian point of view"
;"The problem of the body in Nietzsche and Dōgen"
;"The eloquent silence of Zarathustra"
Reception
Alexander Reynolds, whose review of Nietzsche and Asian Thought appeared in the Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, considers the task of a philosophical dialogue between East and West to be one of great importance, but felt that the work offered little to contribute to this goal. For him, Sprung's piece reveals the lack of interest Nietzsche truly had in Asia, while Nietzsche's reception in Asia can only really be spoken of in Japan, which can be accounted for by Japan's westernization more so than anything else. Reynolds also sees philosophical and philological problems with attempts to offer comparisons between Nietzsche and certain Asian figures. He concludes that, if Nietzsche was to play any part in the convergence of eastern and western philosophy, "it will not be by grace of our elaborating desperately and incredibly on his sporadic Orientalist velleities".Kathleen Marie Higgins sees Nietzsche and Asian Thought as filling a gap in Nietzsche scholarship. She praises the plurality of contributors, despite the fact that the work was prepared primarily for a Western audience, and is also complimentary of the way in which "the volume's comparative essays attempt to do justice to the dissimilarities of both context and concept in cases where Nietzsche's ideas appear prima facie to resemble those of particular Eastern thinkers", thus rendering "more striking the real similarities between Nietzsche's thought and Asian ideas." She criticises the absence of an essay on Nietzsche's reception in India, but conceded that it was perhaps not comparable to his reception in China or Japan. She concludes by saying that "As a work in comparative philosophy, Nietzsche and Asian Thought is exemplary. Its comparative approach is incisive yet accessible. I consider it a 'must read' for English-speaking Nietzsche scholars and comparativists alike."
Legacy
Nietzsche and Asian Thought represents a significant contribution to the scholarship on Nietzsche's relationship with Asian philosophy, and subsequent works that failed to take account of its scholarship have received criticism on that score. However, since the time of its publication, some of the scholarship has been superseded; for instance, in 2004, Thomas H. Brobjer published a more extensive account of Nietzsche's reading than that offered by Figl, and, based on that evidence, argues that Sprung had underestimated the amount of Indian philosophy that Nietzsche had read. Other writers have challenged the conclusions entirely; S. M. Amadae, though acknowledging that Nietzsche and Asian Thought features "state of the art" scholarship reaching conclusions typical of work in the area, feels that the work shows that "the extent to which developed his thought in dialogue with the East is almost wholly unacknowledged." Instead, Amadae argues that Indian philosophy were "biographically and intellectually relevant" to Nietzsche's philosophy.Writing in 2008, Purushottama Bilimoria argues that the approach taken in Nietzsche and Asian Thought is one of three taken to the relationship between Nietzschean and Asian philosophy. For Bilimoria, the school represented by Nietzsche and Asian Thought "indicates that Nietzsche did not pay serious attention to Asian thought", but that Nietzsche's thinking "had an impact on Asian thinking up to modern times." By comparison, other approaches come from Nietzsche and Buddhism: Prolegomenon to Comparative Study by Freny Mistry and Nietzsche and Buddhism: A Study in Nihilism and Ironic Affinities by Robert G. Morrison. For Bilimoria, Mistry's account "underscores the positive influence that Asian thought had on Nietzsche’s philosophy, especially in light of the new direction he sought to give to Western intellectual culture", while Morrison "argues that Nietzsche looked at Buddhism to find an anchor for his thesis of the ‘physiological origins’ of religion that would supersede the prevailing ‘transcendental ones’."
A special issue of the Journal of Nietzsche Studies was published in 2004, aiming to build upon Nietzsche and Asian Thought, which editor Peter S. Groff called "pioneering", as well as subsequent scholarship on the relationship between the thought of Nietzsche and Asian philosophy. The journal contained six articles on the subject. The first three, "Nietzsche's reading about eastern philosophy", by Thomas H. Brobjer, "Nietzsche's Hinduism, Nietzsche's India: another look", by David Smith, and "The 'exotic' Nietzsche—East and West", by Hans-Georg Moeller, relate to Nietzsche's knowledge of Asian philosophy, and interpretations of Nietzsche in Asia. The remaining three, "Wandering beyond the bounds: nomadism, health, and self-undermining", by Steve Coutinho and Geir Sigurdsson, "Zen after Zarathustra: the problem of the will in the confrontation between Nietzsche and Buddhism" by Bret W. Davis, and "Al-Kindī and Nietzsche on the Stoic art of banishing sorrow" by Peter S. Groff, are dialogues between Nietzsche and Asian figures.