SOURCE: Figueira, Dorothy. “Aryan Aristocrats and Übermenschen: Nietzsche's Reading of the Laws of Manu.” Comparatist: Journal of the Southern Comparative Literature 23 (May 1999): 5-20.

[In the following essay, Figueira discusses how Nietzsche incorporated his interest in the Indian law book The Laws of Manu into his work.]

Much has been written on Nietzsche's reconstruction of Indian thought.¹ Indologists and historians of religion have placed great importance on Nietzsche's appropriation of Indian themes; and, indeed, the philosopher's evocation of India is varied and often tantalizing. These evocations range from Nietzsche's use of terminology and concepts to his penchant for quoting Sanskrit sources, as on the title page to Daybreak where he purportedly cites the Rig Veda: “There are so many days that have not yet broken” [Es giebt so viele Morgenröthen die noch nicht geleuchtet haben, (KSA 9: 413)].² One critic has, however, recently discounted the role that Indian thought played for Nietzsche, viewing such references as late and insignificant.³ This position views Nietzsche's evocation of India as specious and accuses him of the very trivialization that he accused Schopenhauer of committing (Untimely 3: 7). To my mind, this is a harsh judgment. While the traces of India's influence in Nietzsche's work are elusive, and the philosopher did not view India with the “trans-European eye” that he claimed (Sprung 83), India did, in fact, play a significant role in Nietzsche's final work. Although he may never have actually read his friend Deussen's monumental work on the Vedanta and was one of the few nineteenth-century educated Germans never to have read Kalidasa's Sakuntala (Sprung 86), he did read what he thought was an authoritative version of the Laws of Manu with care and used this treatise thematically. In the following, I will examine Nietzsche's interpretation of Manu and the use to which he put this Sanskrit dharmasastra, which he did not know in the original but probably in the 1797 German translation of Johann Christoph Hüttner.

READING NIETZSCHE READING INDIA

Although Nietzsche refers frequently to Manu throughout his work, traditional Nietzsche scholars have tended to ignore the philosopher's references to the Hindu law book. Walter Kaufmann's post-World War II rehabilitation of Nietzsche began this trend. Kaufmann underplayed the philosopher's comments on the Indian lawgiver for the simple reason that they dealt primarily with breeding, a topic that would ill-serve Kaufmann's desire to distance Nietzsche from the Nazis (304-05). In fact, Kaufmann even denied that Nietzsche ever dealt at length with the topic of breeding. Though here is not the place to categorize or assess the Nietzsche-Nazi relationship, I might note, in passing, that beginning in the 1940s, Kaufmann (along with other champions of Nietzsche, such as the Mann brothers, Camus, and Bataille) sought to exonerate the philosopher from any inspirational role he may have played for the Nazis. Their position ran counter to that of Lukács and the historian Crane Brinton who claimed that Nietzsche served the Nazi cause. In the last fifty years of Nietzsche reception, a middle ground has prevailed, wherein Nietzsche is seen to have provided elements in his philosophy that were attractive to the Nazis (Santaniello, Nietzsche 149).

Another logic of a less political nature might also account for the critics' refusal to question Nietzsche's references to Manu. While literary-minded scholars approach Nietzsche with a view to honoring the philosopher's resistance to systematization,⁴ the same care cannot be said of theoretically or philosophically oriented scholars. Nietzsche's evocation of a reference as exotic as Manu could, indeed, trouble a conceptual reading, prompting a desire to ignore anything that does not fit a systematic approach. As respected a Nietzsche scholar as Richard Schacht, for example, encourages readers to look beyond the ephemeral noise that clutters Nietzsche's prose and to filter out the static (xv). One must pass over those frequent “rhetorical excesses” that obscure the philosopher's message. If this critical approach is accepted in the field of Nietzsche scholarship, it is no wonder that traditional Nietzsche scholars generally ignore the philosopher's references to the Hindu law treatise.

Readers faced with Nietzsche's fragmentary Nachlass might sympathize with critics who simply ignore Nietzsche's arcane discussions of Manu. Those same readers, however, might also pause at the implications of such an approach. In broad historical terms we know that Nietzsche has suffered far too much from the impositions and selectivity of his readers, whether they be sinister (like his sister and the Nazis) or systematic (like the academic analyses that have come to dominate the institutional reception of Nietzsche). In theoretical terms, if poststructuralism and deconstruction have taught us anything, we must be leery of any “filtering” process. Nietzsche's debt to Indian thought is an excellent case in point. His references to India can be read in two ways. Either Nietzsche constructed his works so that nothing was superfluous and everything rendered as content, or Nietzsche's numerous yet incohesive references to India should be viewed as rhetorical excesses that distract us from his larger message. I tend to think that Nietzsche's literary economy exhibits a propensity to develop a wide variety of themes, among them caste. It is my belief that caste or, as Nietzsche termed it, “order of rank” played a far greater role in his thought than many critics would allow. Moreover, it is my contention that the theme of breeding plays a significant role in Nietzsche's work and that he drew inspiration for his pronouncements from the discussion of caste found in Manu. The following discussion will investigate how he used the Hindu Law treatise to develop an ideology of caste and breeding. I will begin, however, by explaining how Manu came to represent for Nietzsche the Aryan text par excellence, equal in authority to Hindu scripture.⁵

MANU AS A “SEMITIZED” ARYAN SOURCEBOOK

Any discussion of Nietzsche's myth of the Aryan must begin with the Genealogy of Morals (1: 5). In the first essay to this section, Nietzsche claims that the term “arya” denotes “the wealthy” or the “owners” rather than its conventional meaning of “honorable” or “noble” (Monier-Williams 152).⁶ According to Nietzsche, this connotation of the term “arya” points to the Aryans' true nature as masters. However, the Aryans must have undergone some tremendous psychological and physical defeat, if their descendants offer any valid testimony. The blond Aryan, a conqueror and master, was eclipsed by the dark-skinned common man. Races that the Aryans once subjugated, such as the pre-Aryan inhabitants of Italian soil, clearly prevailed in modern times. Their color, size of skull, and perhaps even intellectual and social instincts have neutralized Aryan traits and a miscegenated population now predominates in Europe. Aryan blood has thus racially and morally degenerated. The Western Aryan has all but disappeared. As we shall see, Nietzsche believed that the Indian Aryan largely avoided his distant cousins' fate. The Indian Aryan escaped moral and physical degradation due to his adherence to dictates promulgated in Manu.

In a letter to Peter Gast (31 May 1888), Nietzsche describes Manu as the primeval (uralte) “absolute Aryan product,” that presented a code of morality based on the Veda (Briefe 3[2] 324). As “a summary of the Veda,” Manu was the text of Aryan religion, the racially purest Aryan law book (Will 143), and the only source from which one should develop an understanding of the Aryan worldview. Nietzsche's assessment of Manu was only partially correct.

An examination of Nietzsche's references to the Hindu lawgiver points out a rather significant issue—the quotations from Manu do not correspond to the Sanskrit text itself nor to any translations that were available in Nietzsche's time. Annemarie Etter has shown the extent to which Nietzsche based his discussion on material not found in Manu (342-45). The question then becomes, from what source did Nietzsche cull his citations? In his own footnotes, Nietzsche identified Louis Jacolliot's Les Législateurs religieux: Manou-Moïse-Mahomet as a source reference for his understanding of Manu. Jacolliot claimed to offer excerpts from a southern recension that he identified as the basis for the manuscripts found throughout India and, as a consequence, the recension used by European translators.

Jacolliot had been stationed as a French colonial official near Calcutta. His publications were of a non-specialist nature. He was a popularizer of the “fantastic” school who believed that all intellectual and spiritual thought could be traced back to India (Etter 345-56). In fact, Jacolliot's Manu is a product of the India that had been codified in the Enlightenment (Figueira, “Myth” 53-55). Jacolliot's antisemitism and anti-Christianity (directed primarily against Rome) have their precedent in Voltaire's fulminations, as does his notion that Christianity is a pale copy of brahmanism. That Jacolliot continued a tradition of idealizing ancient India as the source of all subsequent culture is less significant than the new fantasies he brought to this script and transmitted to Nietzsche. Jacolliot supplied Nietzsche with the significant and erroneous notion that Manu was the oldest source book of the Aryan world, dating its compilation at 13,000 BC. It was, therefore, thanks to Jacolliot that Nietzsche's entire understanding of Manu was flawed. Although Nietzsche possessed a fraudulent Manu and a false chronology, his understanding of Manu's significance was not entirely misplaced.

Manu is indeed a standing authority in the orthodox Hindu tradition (Donniger xviii). As a compendium of religious law, custom, and politics, it makes ample references both to Vedic literature and to earlier law codes. As a fundamental text in the literature of dharma,⁷Manu deals with the customs governing the development of the individual and the proper relations of different groups in society. It codifies belief in the fourfold caste system as a means of social cooperation for the common good, even though the system does not promote social coherence (Radhakrishnan 172). Manu stresses that individuals must perform the function for which they are suited as well as that for which they are born.

In theory, Indians have always taken Manu very seriously; whether its privileged status extended to actual use in law courts before British colonial rule is another matter (Donniger ix). It serves as an absolute authority of both Hindu knowledge and practice, competing with the Veda itself. As a text, Manu is cited more often than any other dharma-shastra and has been the subject of nine commentaries. It has always been brokered by the priestly class who borrowed from the prestige of its “Aryan” origin (Donniger xli-xlii). Manu, however, could claim neither the authority nor the antiquity of the Vedas (the ultimate texts of Aryan India) nor of the Upanishads, which are thought by Hindus to be a continuation of the Vedas (Vedanta, i.e. end of the Veda). Although the Vedas and the Upanishads were available in Nietzsche's time in translation and commentary, Nietzsche chose Manu as a “synthesis of the Veda” and ignored all other Sanskrit canonical texts. In order to accept the law book as an alternative to scripture, Nietzsche first established the authority of human law in relation to God's word.

In the Antichrist, written shortly before his breakdown in early 1889, Nietzsche claimed that a population at some point in its evolution declares that the values by which it lives are fixed and are no longer subject to experimentation. The stabilization of core values is achieved either by declaring them revealed or sanctioned by tradition. As revelation, these values appear as laws created not from human experimentation but from divine intervention. As such, they are perfect and outside history, a gift from God. Tradition claims its own authority. It too exists from the beginning. Since it was created by our ancestors, it would be impious to call it into question. Thus, for Nietzsche, both scripture and tradition lay claim to equal textual authority (Antichrist 57). Either God has given us our values or our ancestors have lived them and codified them as law. Nietzsche maintained that the Aryan philosophers of the Vedanta took this notion one step further when they usurped all power, authority, and credibility. By judging the whole course of nature as conditioned by their laws, the Aryans equated truth with the teaching of priests and reduced reason to a mechanism of conformity with law itself as the highest end. According to Nietzsche, law became their highest reference. The exemplum of Aryan lawbooks, Manu, thus became for Nietzsche the authoritative Aryan reference. The priority that others assigned to the Veda, Nietzsche gave to Manu.

Nietzsche made human law supersede divine revelation for the very reason that Manu complemented his ideas on religion in a noteworthy manner and provided him with a revolutionary system of human morality.⁸ Indeed, Nietzsche came to believe that all the moral teachings of nations such as Egypt or Greece were only caricatures of Aryan moral laws first articulated in Manu (Will 143). An examination of Nietzsche's references to Manu quickly reveals what he found so captivating. Nietzsche's reading of Manu focused exclusively on caste and its relationship to breeding (Züchtung). In fact, the breeding of caste was the only thing that Nietzsche found appealing in India at all (Twilight 7.3).

According to Nietzsche, Manu was founded upon a “holy lie” consisting of the priests' belief that they represented the supreme expression of the type “man.” Priests derive their concept of “improvement from themselves.” Believing in their own superiority, they will themselves to be superior. The origin of their holy lie (or new concept of truth) resides in this will to power. In order to establish their rule, they needed to place power in the priesthood. This was a radically new concept, since priests did not possess power physically or militarily. In fact, they were powerless (Genealogy I.7),⁹ the direct antithesis of the knightly aristocrat and, as such, the most evil creatures. There was even something unhealthy about them. Priests turned away from action and combined brooding with emotional volatility, as seen in the antisensual and enervating metaphysics of the brahmins: “With priests, everything becomes more dangerous: not only cures and therapies, but also arrogance, revenge, perspicacity, extravagance, love, desire to dominate, virtue, illness …” (Genealogy I.6). Priestly claims to power did not stem from naivete or self-deception. “Fanatics” do not invent such carefully thought-out systems of oppression. The most cold-blooded reflection was at work. Manu provides the classic model, in a specifically Aryan form, of priestly ambition. It presents the most fundamental lie ever formulated, a lie that, copied almost everywhere, has corrupted the whole world (Will 142).

In particular, this Aryan spirit of the priest corrupted the Jews and Christians. The ideal of a state run by priests (“Semitism”) consists of reviving the Aryan order of caste (Will 143). Nietzsche felt that caste should be reinstated, since modern society had been overrun by scum, criminals, and the mentally ill. Because of Christianity, modern society is no longer a society at all, but a “sick conglomerate of chandalas” without the strength to excrete (Will 50).¹⁰ The establishment of equal rights had created a social hodge-podge, where the canaille of all the castes had mingled their blood. After two or three generations of mixing, race was no longer recognizable and everything had become a mob (Will 864).

The brahmin priest and the chandala outcaste became pregnant symbols for Nietzsche.¹¹ He equated the chandala with all that was wrong with society. However, Nietzsche also identified the chandala with the figure of the philosopher (Antichrist 13) and, by extension, with himself. Finally, he established the chandala as the antithesis to the Übermensch and identified the brahmin with the Aryan. Thus, the philosopher's fascination with caste regulations had wide-ranging significance for his moral system.

THE ARYAN AS ÜBERMENSCH

In a late fragment, Nietzsche wrote: “What is noble? Thoughts on the order of rank” (KSA 12: 45). He viewed the order of rank as an order of power (Will 856). When Nietzsche called for a “new aristocracy” or a “new ruling caste” he advocated, in actuality, an order of rank between classes modeled on the caste regulations he found in Manu. Nietzsche felt impelled to reestablish an order of rank, since universal suffrage had eroded the “pathos of distance” necessary for the aristocratic value upon which society depended.¹² A doctrine was needed that was powerful enough to work as a breeding agent that would strengthen the strong and paralyze or destroy the world-weary (Will 862). Since no social grouping had the courage to claim master rights and society continued to suffer (Antichrist 43), Nietzsche demanded a return to an order that would sanction master privilege and engender a pathos of distance between classes. He found this order in the Indian caste system, but also, it should be noted, in medieval Europe and ancient Rome.

The pathos of distance grew out of the ingrained difference between strata. Nietzsche believed that when a ruling caste can look down upon its subjects, it easily suppresses them. In doing so, “that other, more mysterious pathos” can grow up, that

craving for an ever new widening of distances within the soul itself, the development of ever higher, rarer, more remote, further-stretching, more comprehensive states—in brief simply the enhancement of the type “man,” the continual “self-overcoming of man” to use a moral formula in a supra-moral sense.

(Beyond 257)

Thus, the pathos of distance that engendered caste separation also served as the origin of higher aspiration.

Moreover, order of rank was essential to any genuine culture (Will 184) and a precondition for every elevation in culture (Antichrist 43). It provided the catalyst¹³ and an arrangement for breeding (Beyond 262) human beings who would carry the seeds of the future (Gay Science 23). The reestablishment of an order of rank would make possible the creation of the Übermensch whom Nietzsche envisioned as the goal of human striving (Will 1001) upon whose arrival the destiny of humanity depended (Will 987). It was this very order of rank that was lacking in European culture and lacking in Christianity.¹⁴ Europe needed a new order lest Christian values of mercy and compassion destroy it.¹⁵ Without an order of rank, the sick and the weak flourish and culture becomes “the sum of zeroes, with every zero having equal rights” (Will 53). Nietzsche found a propitious model for such a highly stratified social and political system in the aristocratic society that he discovered in Manu.

Nietzsche clearly equated morality with the improvement of man as a species. He viewed such improvement taking two possible forms: through taming (as in the case of an animal in a zoo or a human in the Church) or through the breeding of a definite race.¹⁶ Judging the latter option preferable, he viewed its most grandiose example revealed in Manu. Nietzsche understood Manu as a text primarily dealing with the task of breeding four races.¹⁷ He found the Aryans who developed Manu's “breeding” morality a hundred times more gentle and rational than the Christians who had devised a taming morality (Twilight 7.3). To enter the Aryan utopia described in Manu was akin to escaping the fetid air of the Christian sick house and dungeon (Kranken- und Kerkerluft). Quite literally, the New Testament “stinks” when compared to Manu. Juxtaposed to the law book of the ruling class of Aryan India, it represented a paltry (armselig) tradition.

CHRISTIANITY, AN ANTI-ARYAN OUTCASTE RELIGION

In Nietzsche's view, Aryan religion deified the feeling of power (Will 145), while Christianity represented a reaction against the Aryan morality of breeding race and privilege.

The problem I thus pose is not what shall succeed mankind in the sequence of living beings (man is an end), but what type of man shall be bred, shall be willed, for being higher in value […] Even in the past this higher type has appeared often—but as a fortunate accident, as an exception, never as something willed. […] from dread the opposite type was willed, bred and attained: the domestic animal, the herd animal, the sick human animal—the Christian.

(Antichrist 3)

In Christianity, the individual had become so important that he could no longer be sacrificed. According to Nietzsche, nothing was more dangerous than when all types became equal before God (Will 246). Christianity, as a counterprinciple to selection, represented the anti-Aryan religion par excellence: a total subversion (Umwerthung) of Aryan values and a victory of chandala values (Twilight 7.4). With Christianity, the masters had been defeated by common men. Their victory entailed blood poisoning (Genealogy I.9). As the religion for the poor and downtrodden, the wretched, ill-constituted and underprivileged, plebeian Jewish Christianity defeated race (Genealogy I.9). Although it passed itself off as a religion of love, Christianity represents nothing but the revenge of the chandala (Twilight 7.4). It denies the enslavement necessary to bring about the emergence of a higher type (Will 259).

In order for Christianity to function as a chandala religion, it had to have originated among a chandala people. And, indeed, Nietzsche speculated that the Jews were once chandalas under the servitude of Hindus. It was during this time that “their type” as an enslaved and despised group took root. As a chandala race, the Jews gradually ennobled themselves by taking control of lands and creating gods (KSA 13: 377-8). They learned from their Indian rulers how to make a priesthood their master and how to organize a people (Will 143).¹⁸ In fact, it was in the figure of the Jew that chandala hatred first became flesh (Antichrist 58). In other words, the Jews recognized their chandala status, embraced it, and turned it to their advantage. They incorporated animosity against the aristocratic, the noble, and the proud into their religion.¹⁹ They institutionalized their hatred against power and the ruling classes (Will 184). Their revolt ultimately resulted in the creation of the true chandala religion, Christianity (Will 145), when the Jewish priestly caste itself became a privileged aristocracy and was overthrown. Christ was the ultimate chandala, a figure who rejected the Jewish priests in order to be redeemed (KSA 13: 396).

Nietzsche's argument, however novel its contours, points to the familiar strategy that informs much historical speculation on religion. Its message dates from the Enlightenment: the displacement of the Jewish faith from its position of religious prominence. The argument is theological rather than racial.

THE JEW AND THE ARYAN

While Nietzsche's Aryan brahmins functioned both literally and symbolically, it is important to note that he did not identify them with Germans or contrast them to the Jews. In fact, his future master race was to be reared from international racial unions (Will 960).²⁰ Nietzsche had long since repudiated the anti-Semitism he flirted with in his Wagner days (Kaufmann 42-47); thus he reviled German anti-Semites and felt they should be expelled (Beyond 251). Closer to home, he mocked the anti-Semitic colonial venture of his sister and brother-in-law in Paraguay and their attempt to form a racially pure new Germany there. Indeed, contrary to anti-Semitic and Germanophile groups, Nietzsche viewed the Jews racially as the strongest and purest race in Europe (Beyond 251). He maintained that when Semitic stock bred with Aryans, a particularly fruitful mixture arose (KSA 12: 45). He claimed, in fact, that the much vaunted purity of the German soul was a blend of Slav, Celt, and Jew (KSA 11: 702). Nietzsche felt that, had it been their predilection, the Jews could have conquered Europe. Their priority lay elsewhere—in finding a homeland—and Nietzsche called upon Europe to accommodate Jews in this legitimate quest (Beyond 261). He feared the increasing violence directed against Jews (Human 1: 475). In other words, Nietzsche admired both the contemporary Jew and the prophets of the Old Testament. It was the priestly, prophetic strand of Judaism that he despised.²¹

In other words, Nietzsche's sympathy with the modern Jew as a self-sufficient and incorruptible threatened minority did not influence his negative judgment of Judaism in its priestly manifestation and the Christianity that it had spawned. It was this line of descent that posed the problem. Prophetic Judaism was condemned for its role in producing Christianity (Duffy). The important point of this reasoning was to expose the Jews as imitators of the Aryans. They should not appear as the true authors of Europe's origins.

Nietzsche was not unique in this line of thinking, to wit, Voltaire's claims for the fraudulent Ezour Vedam as a text predating the Bible by 2000 years (Figueira, “Myth” 54-55). Just as Voltaire tried to show with his discovery of the lost Veda, so Nietzsche attempted to prove with his reading of Manu. The Jews are only agents, intermediaries, and mediators (Vermittler); they “discover” nothing (Will 143). Unlike the Aryans, Jews were not creative.²² Both Voltaire and Nietzsche called upon the authority of “Aryan” texts to support their polemics. Voltaire had called upon “Vedic” revelation to debunk Hebrew revelation. Nietzsche, however, called upon the authority of Aryan law, since his philosophy had rendered any kerymatic authority meaningless. It is only logical that, with the death of God, tradition should carry more weight than scripture.

Nietzsche found it significant that the Aryans had sought to regulate morality through human law rather than through divine scripture. He felt that by creating a law book like Manu and imbuing it with superordinate authority, the Aryans were willing to concede for themselves the right to become masterful and perfect. Nietzsche, in fact, viewed them as a master race (Will 145). Through experimentation, they had perfected their way of life. The caste system, the supreme dominating Aryan law, was made to appear as a natural law sanctioning a natural order, exempt from arbitrary caprice and “modern ideas” (Antichrist 57). The highest caste represented this nobility.

The most spiritual men, as the strongest, find their happiness where others would find their destruction: in the labyrinth, in hardness against themselves and others, in experiments; their joy is self-conquest; asceticism becomes in them nature, need, and instinct. Difficult tasks are a privilege to them; to play with burdens which crush others, a recreation. Knowledge—a form of asceticism. They are the most venerable kind of man; this does not preclude their being the most cheerful and the kindliest. They rule not because they want to but because they are; they are not free to be second. […] The order of castes, the order of rank, merely formulates the highest law of life; the separation of the three types is necessary for the preservation of society, to make possible the higher and the highest types. The inequality of rights is the first condition for the existence of any rights at all. […] As one climbs higher, life becomes ever harder: the coldness increases, responsibility increases. A high culture is a pyramid; it can stand only on a broad base, its first presupposition is a strong and soundly consolidated mediocrity.

(Antichrist 57)

Compared with this Aryan order of rank, the modern moral order was bankrupt. The mixture of classes and races had leveled out and mediocritized all humanity. Man was on his own and needed a new nobility with a will for the future (Zarathustra 3.11). Manu provided Nietzsche with the “conscious breeding process” that he envisioned as the foundation for the development of the master race (Will 954, Beyond 251).

Although in the above quote Nietzsche specifically described the highest among three castes, he clearly envisioned the brahmin as a partial model for his man of the future, shaped through breeding (Gay Science 577). He considered the brahmin as the highest type of man, the complete antithesis of the chandala (Will 139). Brahmins incarnated for Nietzsche the abstract Aryan virtues of strength, duty, power, and order (KSA 13: 381). Their asceticism consisted of moderation in diet and sexual activity. Their disdain for wealth and worldly power enabled them to rule over others.²³ Nietzsche even endowed his ideal brahmins with a will to power.²⁴ Nietzsche claimed that the brahmins were emancipated from the senses and dignified, as opposed to the savage who was an unclean and incalculable beast (Will 237). The brahmin was a terror-inspiring animal-tamer toward his beasts.²⁵

Nietzsche thus accepted the reality that Manu's breeding organization had to be fearsome (furchtbar) in order to work. It necessitated confronting the non-bred chandala.²⁶ Simple hygienic measures had not been sufficient, necessitating Manu's more draconian sanctions in order to better separate the “virtuous,” and the “people of race,” from the chandala breed (Twilight 7.3). It was precisely Manu's variation of the jus talionis that allowed the Aryan to “atone” and become religiously free again (KSA 13: 380). Nietzsche claimed that by reinstating the breeding regulations of caste, Aryan humanity could exist again for modern man in its pure and primordial form. He willingly acknowledged that the consequences of this eugenic ideal were severe. Manu, in fact, exemplified just how the notion of pure blood was not a harmless concept, but rather, the immortalization of hatred as a religion and as a form of genius.

Nietzsche not only incorporated Manu in his work, but even embraced the harshness with which Manu ordered the Aryan world. Given the attention and praise Nietzsche gave to the Hindu lawgiver, it is difficult to accept Kaufmann's assertion that Nietzsche denounced the way in which Manu dealt with outcastes.²⁷ I believe that this assessment reflects Kaufmann's rehabilitating mission far more than any confusion or misreading of Nietzsche's intent. It seems evident that Nietzsche embraced the brutality of the concept of breeding as an integral attribute of the Übermensch and a historical necessity for his development. Kaufmann was clearly distancing his subject from the recent past when he stated that Nietzsche was “against the concept of pure blood that could be invoked again someday to justify the oppression of non-Aryans” (225-27). Historically, Kaufmann had to deny Nietzsche's ideology of breeding. He first minimized the philosopher's treatment of the theme. He then overemphasized Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche's heavy-handed emendation. Finally, after initially discounting any thematic of breeding in Nietzsche, Kaufmann claimed that the philosopher's “strong concern with breeding derived from Plato” (305).²⁸

Two strategies appear to be at work here. First, Nietzsche must not be held in any way accountable for Nazi eugenics. Second, and more obscurely, Kaufmann had to reject the possibility of any non-Western influence upon Nietzsche in order to elevate him to the first rank of continental philosophers. As Wilhelm Halbfass has shown, a historical refusal to engage Indian philosophy has contributed to the Eurocentrism of the institutional discourse of philosophy. India was excluded both from the genetic context of the European history of philosophy and from the domain to which the concept of philosophy is applicable (155). Traditionally, and thanks to the added impetus of Hegel, “caretakers of a specialized scholarly discipline” were unwilling to concede to India a real philosophy (146). The traditional view of doxography and the history of philosophy have obscured a significant aspect of Nietzsche's thought, namely how India, or more precisely Manu, informed his idea of the Ubermensch.

CONCLUSION

Until the mid-nineteenth century, the Aryans' presence in the West was limited to the scholarly domain of philosophy and the “scientific” fields of ethnography, botany, craniology, etc. Max Müller's enthusiastic public relations work on behalf of the Vedic Aryans, which went well beyond his thirty-year production of a critical edition of the Rig Veda Samhita, effected their entree into the public domain where a new generation of “philosophers” working outside an institutional framework developed popular theories regarding the Aryans. The discourse of the Aryan based itself on loose attribution of Vedic sources, Indological scholarship, and translations of other canonical Sanskrit materials, regardless of their status or antiquity. Nietzsche's reception of Indian thought must be viewed in this context.

Nietzsche's commentary on Manu is found primarily in his late works. Nevertheless, his interest in India was lifelong. Like Goethe, who wrote his two Indian poems after a lifetime of reflection on Indian lyric, and Wagner, who on his death-bed lamented the unwritten Buddhist opera that had occupied him for forty years, Nietzsche's thoughts on India also matured before he tried to articulate them. Like Wagner, there was not sufficient time. In passing, we might note that a large part of exoticism's lure lies precisely in its indigestibility. Either Nietzsche suffered his breakdown before he fully developed his thoughts on India, or what we have is really the only aspect of India that mattered to him. The interesting point is that Nietzsche chose to emphasize Manu as the sourcebook for his fiction of the Aryan race. Rather than Müller's voluminous commentary on the Rig Veda or other Sanskrit canonical sources that were available to him, Nietzsche prioritized Manu. It alone offered him the necessary corrective to cultural degeneration.

Nietzsche posited a lost Aryan Golden Age and attributed its loss to the deleterious effects of religious compassion. Christianity destroys race by making populations soft. Nietzsche's metaphors were complex: the Jews appear as anti-Aryans or chandala outcastes; Jesus is the ultimate chandala. The Übermensch possesses values that Nietzsche attributed to the virtual Aryan. In each instance, the Jew has been managed: either displaced from its primary position in religious history or bracketed in a role of existential insignificance.

Nietzsche's discourse on the Aryan fixated on the issue of caste and its role in maintaining blood purity. He focused on the manner in which Aryan blood was diluted in various populations. Nietzsche held Aryan brahmins to be a group that, thanks to Manu, had largely escaped blood degeneration. For Nietzsche, the brahmin assumed the characteristics of this idealized Aryan. In fact, Nietzsche's portrait of the Aryan is ineluctably bound to an ideological assessment of modern brahmin behavior. In Nietzsche, the Aryan coalesces with the brahmin (Hulin 70).

The critical reception of Nietzsche's exoticism is particularly instructive. We have seen to what degree Kaufmann was disingenuous in his assessment of Nietzsche's use of Manu. The only cross-cultural link acknowledged is Nietzsche's indebtedness to Greek thought. I have noted some of the factors that might have contributed to the dismissal of the philosopher's debt to Indian thought: the need to distance Nietzsche from Nazi eugenics and the unwillingness to take Indian philosophy seriously. Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, in her desire to make the Will to Power her brother's ultimate statement, initially confused the issue by arbitrarily raising the theme of breeding to a structural principle in the edition she compiled. As I hope this discussion has shown, beyond his sister's kind ministrations, Nietzsche himself had presented a coherent vision of caste and breeding at various junctures in the final versions of his work.²⁹

A crucial lesson to be learned is how politics direct our (mis)readings. There are great dangers in reading literature in the service of ideological rewritings of history. Literary works should not be dissected and mined for what they can offer by way of a specific thesis, nor should they be made to fit dogmatic institutional scripts. When this occurs, scholarship becomes brahmanical: it hierarchizes a caste of readers wielding priestly power in the temples of academe.

The time is long past for protecting Nietzsche from any Nazi association or legitimizing his place in the pantheon of philosophers. The time is also past for denying Indian thought its rightful place in the development of Western philosophical thought. Critically speaking, the need to manage Nietzsche cannot be completed by the construction of an expurgated Nietzsche, but only by a willingness to look squarely at and accept all aspects of his work, however exotic and distasteful they may be.

Notes

1. In particular see Conway; Santaniello “Post Holocaust” and Nietzsche; Parkes; Mistry; Stambaugh; Rollman; von Glasenapp; and Alsdorf.

2. As Sprung has noted (78-9), Nietzsche freely adapted this quotation from a Vedic passage that both German and English translations of the time read in a contrary sense, as “There are so many dawns that have already dawned.”

   In the Nietzsche citations, I refer to section or aphorism number, rather than page number. For direct quotations I use the standard English translations cited in the bibliography. The Kritische Studien Ausgabe (KSA) is used when the reference is unavailable in translation. In those references to the KSA, volume and page number are cited.

3. For Sprung, Nietzsche's connection with India rests to a great degree on the philosopher's long-standing friendship with Paul Deussen, the prominent 19th-century Vedanta scholar. But this critic's analysis of Nietzsche's library and correspondence and those of his friends suggests that Nietzsche did not read much regarding Indian philosophy and did not discuss it at all with his acquaintances.

4. I am thinking primarily of Milan Kundera's remarks in Testaments Betrayed (150), but the same can be said of a number of poststructuralist readings.

5. Nietzsche was largely indebted to Louis Jacolliot's strange book on Manu, Les Législateurs religieux: Manou—Moïse—Mahomet. Nietzsche borrowed from Jacolliot the notion that Manu was equal to scripture in value. Relatively faithful translations were available for Nietzsche's use. Sir William Jones partially translated Manu in 1776 (Institutes of Hindu Law: or the Ordinances of Meno according to the Gloss of Cullúca). This translation was rendered into German in 1797 by J. C. Hüttner (Hindu Gesetzbuch oder Manu's Verordnungen nach Cullucas Erläuterungen). Auguste Loiseleur Deslongchamps produced a French translation in 1833, and Geroge Bühler translated Manu in the Sacred Books of the East series in 1886.

6. German Sanskrit dictionaries of the time (Böhtlingk, Cappeller) define “arya” in accord with standard English ones. It is, indeed, ironic that a philologist of Nietzsche's caliber should rely on a faulty definition in understanding the Aryan.

7. There are four aims of Hindu life: dharma (duty), artha (worldly gain), kama (erotic love), and moksha (liberation).

8. See letter to Peter Gast of 31 May 1888, Briefe 3(2): 324.

9. In the next sentence, Nietzsche claimed that no one epitomized his point as much as the Jews who exacted satisfaction on their enemies through the radical and vengeful transvaluation of their values.

10. The term “chandala” denotes “outcaste,” “man of the lowest stratum of society,” “extremely despised and shunned,” “a mixed caste born of a brahmin mother and a shudra father” (Monier-Williams 383).

11. Elsewhere, I have discussed the symbolic use of the outcaste in European thought and artistic representation and have touched upon the importance of this metaphor in Nietzsche's writing (Exotic 29-45).

12. On aristocratic values, see Genealogy I.16; Beyond 257. On the vote, see Will 854: “In the age of universal suffrage (i.e. when everyone may sit in judgment of everyone and everything), I feel impelled to reestablish order of rank.”

13. The order of rank provides “that tremendous energy of greatness in order to shape the man of the future through breeding” (Will 964).

14. In contrast, the Jews possessed an order of rank that allowed them to avoid decadence even after they had become enslaved (Will 427).

15. Without a firmly established order of rank, spiritual strength is worthless (Will 53).

16. “What I want to make clear by all the means in my power: a. that there is no worse confusion than the confusion of breeding with taming; which is what has been done—Breeding, as I understand it, is a means of storing up the tremendous forces of mankind so that the generations can build upon the work of their forefathers—not only outwardly, but inwardly, organically growing out of them and becoming something stronger” (Will 398).

17. Nietzsche seems to use the term “race” interchangably with “caste”. Therefore, the “races” to which Nietzsche refers consist of the brahmins (priests), ksatriyas (warriors), vaishyas (merchants) and shudras (outcastes).

18. Nietzsche claimed that the Chinese also seemed to have learned much from Manu, as seen in the teachings of Confucius and Laotse.

19. As a chandala religion, the Jews early on lost two of their castes, the warriors and the peasant (Will 184).

20. A case can be made that Nietzsche's “splendid blond beast” was not German. This term occurs five times (three times in Genealogy, Part I; once in Part II; and once in Twilight). Its first usage in Genealogy states that the beast is at the bottom of all noble races including the Romans, Homeric Greeks, Arabs, Japanese or Vikings (I.11). When reference is made to Teutons, they are Teutons of old, distinct from Germans of today (Santaniello, Nietzsche 106). Kaufmann conjectured what Nietzsche might have meant by the term, “the noble lion” (225). This theory is not generally accepted. As Detweiler notes (11), Nietzsche discussed the blondness of the ancient Aryans (Genealogy I.5) a few pages before he first mentioned the blond beast in Genealogy. It can be argued that the blond beast represented the ancient Aryan, as Nietzsche understood him from Manu. It has been our thesis that the Aryan provided Nietzsche with a propitious model for the Übermensch.

21. For a discussion of Nietzsche's categorizing of different groups of Jews, see Santaniello, “Post Holocaust” and Nietzsche 31; Gilman 76.

22. In a letter to Köselitz (cited in Cancik 64), Nietzsche claimed that even Jewish laws were derived from the Aryan law as codified in Manu.

23. KSA 13, 14 [215]; 13, 14 [212-21]. For Nietzsche's admiration for Indian asceticism, see Hulin 69-70.

24. “Gentle, frugal, self effacing, he voluntarily lets the shudra wallow in vulgar pleasures, the vaishya parade his opulence, and the ksatriya strut upon the political stage while his preoccupation is getting others to affirm cosmic order” (Antichrist 57).

25. Nietzsche drew no distinctions between brahmin behavior codified in Manu and the present-day brahmin. Both embodied those values that Nietzsche sought in the higher aristocracy he envisioned for the future (Will 752, 866).

26. Nietzsche often used the term chandala, a more exotic equivalent for another favorite term, canaille, defining them as “mischmasch-Menschen” or “Nicht-Zucht Menschen.” Chandalas are not to be confused with shudras, whom Nietzsche defined as a service race, a lower kind of people whom the Aryans discovered in situ when they landed in India. For Nietzsche, the chandala represents the degenerated of all castes, permanent phlegm (Auswurfstoffe) (KSA 13: 396-97).

27. Kaufmann supports Nietzsche's supposed rejection of Manu with the following quote from Twilight 7.4: “These regularities are instructive enough: in them we find for once Aryan humanity, quite pure, quite primordial—we learn that the concept ‘pure blood’ is the opposite of a harmless concept. It becomes clear, on the other hand, in which people the hatred, the Chandala hatred for this ‘humanity’ has become immortalized, where it has become religious, where it has become genius.”

28. Kaufmann apparently refers to a passage where Plato has Socrates note:

    It follows from what we have just said that, if we are to keep our flock at the highest pitch of excellence, there should be as many unions of the best of both sexes, and as few of the inferior, as possible, and that only the offspring of the better unions should be kept. And again, no one but the Rulers must know how all this is being effected; otherwise our herd of Guardians may become rebellious.

    (The Republic 5.459)

    Attributing Nietzsche's discussions on race and breeding to Greek sources continues in recent scholarship (Cancik 65, 67; Conway 35).

29. Kaufmann claimed that Nietzsche used the terms “Zucht” and “Züchtung” only once as the title of the fourth and last part of The Will to Power, then abandoned it as soon as he had written it down. Förster-Nietzsche later chose this draft when she edited this volume because it fit her and Förster's interests (304, 306).

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