Gurmat (Sikhi) and Nietzsche

Takeaways

• Maintaining our sense of good and evil (ethics) based on Christian teachings without faith in Christianity makes no sense.
• Elites justifying lip service to these traditional ideas of right and wrong ethics are leaving the wider society directionless and open to disaster.
• Connecting with the will of Life, the will to power is a way forward.

At first sight finding common ground between Sikhi and the philosophy of Nietzsche might seem hard. After all, Sikhs believe in God and Nietzsche famously wrote that, “God is dead.” However, if we consider the meaning of his famous phrase, then the comparison begins to make a lot of sense. For Nietzsche’s point was not that God did not exist, that for him was just an obvious point. His point was that society continued to behave as if God did exist even though it refused to believe that he did. The tragedy of this, for him, was that people in nineteenth century Europe were following beliefs without any ground or passion for doing so, but only out of tired habit. The inevitable result of this must be decay. The only way out, he suggested, lay in people affirming their own will to live, will to power and leaving behind the shell of Christian moral teachings. These teachings had developed when slaves in the Roman Empire became Christian. They projected a hatred of power and pleasure in life in the world. The slaves masked their self-interest as the weak. Their purpose was to tie up the strong, preventing them from being all they could through their will to power by labelling material pleasure and power as ‘evil’. The weak were unable to achieve everything they could and strong were not allowed to.

I think of his description like a class of schoolchildren who are used to an effective teacher. Even in her absence they continue to behave as if she were there. The class prefect reassures them that she will return. This guarantees the position of the prefect but also prevents experiments in learning that the class could now freely engage in. As days, weeks and months go on the scene becomes more horrifying as the life force of the class — every child’s passion to learn how to engage most effectively in the world — is wasted.

Certainly, Gurmat would support leaving this Christian shell. Guru Nanak rejected the idea that the world or maya was evil. What was to be avoided was worldliness. However, arguably its worst legacy is its dualism. A person is a Christian or pagan, saved or damned, good or evil. These binaries then flow through the rest of society as white and black, male and female. The result is a world divided against itself.

In its place Gurmat is about One God, one humanity. Guru Nanak begins his mission with the message, “There is no Hindu, no Muslim.” His writings are collected in an interfaith prayer book, the Guru Granth Sahib. Approximately one tenth of it comprises Hindu, Muslim and Buddhist mystical writing. Guru Arjun writes, “No one is my enemy, and no one is a stranger. I am friendly towards everyone” (Guru Granth Sahib: 1299). We need to recognize ourselves as one clan, one village or one fellowship on spaceship Earth. When our mental borders dissolve, our physical borders may disappear. In his interfaith dialogue with Buddhist monks, the Siddhas, called Siddha Gosht and collected in pages 938–946 of the Guru Granth Sahib he argues that family life is superior to the life of a monk. Work, sex and military protection of society is just as important in being all that we can as meditating. This teaching is called meeri-peeri. ‘Meeri’ is a word meaning ‘rich’ and ‘peeri’ is a holy person. The balance of worldly and spiritual power is superior to a one-sided spirituality that denies the beauty and value of the world.

There is also agreement that following moral codes half-heartedly, when the ground and motive force underlying them has vanished, leads to decline. This is something Nietzsche held the nineteenth century bourgeois thought leaders of Europe responsible for. Economic prosperity provided distraction from a moral framework that caged people. Similarly, Guru Nanak blamed the moral decline of the leaders for the suffering of ordinary people when the Mongols turned their attention to India, establishing the Mughal Empire in 1526. Political leaders had failed to prepare while religious leaders peddled superstition.

Likewise, both see the promise of renewal in a will to power. For Nietzsche the will to power is something real, albeit beyond our physical senses. For Nanak, the will is the hukam of the One. This will expresses itself in boundless love, a universal grace, WaheGuru. Apart from tying humanity together it means that we should not fear power. The doctrine of meeri-peeri, harmony between worldly power and spiritual power defies a duality between the spiritual and the physical, between a God in heaven and damned humans on earth. It affirms 1Force who is an indwelling presence like “fire in wood, reflection in a mirror, fragrance within a flower.” One should not reject the power of Life, Its will to power but align with it. One need not fear or reject power but learn to manage and control it, in the service of love. For Nietzsche the higher individual or Ubermensch rejects a meaningless life or nihilism following the death of religion. Clearing away the rotting corpse they own their own choices as they affirm the power inherent in Life itself. Nietzsche may be dead but he speaks in unity with some words of the Guru. For Nanak the central question is: how does not become ‘sachiara’, authentic, real, all that they can. The answer is to unite the the Sat, real, being through its hukam, or will to power.