The Thammasat University Library has acquired two new books that should be useful for students who are interested in philosophy, literature, history, political science, linguistics, and related fields. They are about Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, a German philosopher, cultural critic, and philologist who lived in the 1800s and wrote books that have had much impact on intellectual history. The TU Library owns several other books by and about Nietzsche.

Hiking with Nietzsche: On Becoming Who You Are is shelved in the General Stacks of the Pridi Banomyong Library, Tha Prachan campus. It was written by Professor John Kaag, who teaches philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Lowell in the United States of America.

I Am Dynamite!: A Life of Nietzsche by Sue Prideaux, a biography, is also shelved in the General Stacks of the Pridi Banomyong Library.

Hiking with Nietzsche: Becoming Who You Are is about a hiking trip to mountains in Switzerland Swiss where Nietzsche wrote one of his most famous works.  

I Am Dynamite!: A Life of Nietzsche tells how the philosopher, despite an unhappy life full of illnesses, managed to write such influential books.

Nietzsche in the Kingdom

Thai readers have long been aware of the importance of Nietzsche as a thinker, and Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols, or, How to Philosophize with a Hammer was translated into Thai language in 1976. Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra was translated into Thai language in 1997. Both of these translations are in the TU Library collection.

Many Thai researchers have written academic papers and theses about Nietzsche. Among them are Khun Thanoot Nanpen of Chiang Mai University, who published a research article in the 2018 issue of Panidhana: Journal of Philosophy and Religion, published by the Department of Philosophy and Religion, Faculty of Humanities, Chiang Mai University.

It is edited by Dr. Piyaboot Sumettikoon. The journal’s objectives are to spread and exchange knowledge, ideas and research results in philosophy and religion and to promote and support research and research on philosophy and religion in society.

Khun Thanoot’s article was entitled Concepts of Man in Series of Novels Mafia Luerd Mangkorn from Friedrich Nietzsche’s Perspective.

As all TU students know, Mafia Luerd Mungkorn is a series of novels about the lives of five individuals in the Mafia world, that later inspired a lakorn, a television drama also known as a Thai television soap opera, that was broadcast in 2015. Mafia Luerd Mungkorn showed how Chinese immigrants became accustomed to Thai culture.

Khun Thanoot’s abstract for the article follows:

• This article aims to: 1) analyze the concept of human from the Friedrich  Nietzsche’s perspective and 2) analyze the series of novels “Mafia Luerd Mangkorn” from the Friedrich Nietzsche’s view of human. The study use Nietzsche’s ideas of human nature to analyze five novels which are, Mangkorn, Suer, Sing, Krating, Rad and Hong. It looks through the concept of human and will to power, the man with their Master morality, Slave morality and Overman that appears in the novel respectively.
• The results reveal that power initiated by gangsters in the novels has been used for governance and dominations of physical power and also used for preserving and balancing of power between gangs. Moreover, different kind of power has been used in the form of traditional power which is power from ancestral belief. It helps bring Mafia gangs to gain power in China Town (Yaowarat). The study shows that characters in the series are fit to Nietzsche’s characterize of power which some includes slave morality while the other with master morality; some came into power with force and other, with soft power.
• The study shows not only dark side of mafia’s world in Yaowarat, but the morality among mafias which aims for higher ground governance, that is, to preserve Chinese customs and identity, and moral code within their gang, and among others.

Further research

In the July – December 2012 issue of the Journal of Liberal Arts Prince of Songkla University, Ajarn Naruedej Labanukrom, a guest lecturer at the International College: Burapha University, Sripatum University and Ramkhamhaeng University, wrote on Heidegger’s Interpretation on Nietzsche’s Concept of Nihilism.

In the article, Ajarn Naruedej specifically compared Nietzsche’s writings to contemporary Thai society:

Nietzsche employed the term ‘nihilism’ to describe the “already” growing sense of emptiness (or nothingness) befalling people who had no ‘faith’ in the standard and value that regulated his or her daily life, but who could find no other (or better) alternatives to bring new values into his or her being. Similarly, the problem for humanity today is many people no longer believe in traditional concepts of ‘virtue,’ omnipotent God, and moral ideals that shaped the previous religious views of the world; moreover, they lack courage, guidance, or power to create values and meanings capable of underpinning a new vision suitable for themselves. Take our Thai culture for example, not only is it continuously losing a deep appreciation from the younger generation via mainstream ‘Western’ culture, but also our standard of morality and religious (Buddhist) practices too are all facing crisis challenged by recent nihilism and its manifestations relative to neoliberalism as “postmodern desymbolization” of individuals and the effects it has upon the ‘subject-form.’… Generally speaking, nihilism is now a subject on global scale. Hence, I believe it is not over exaggerated at all to say that Thailand and most other Asian countries, if not all, are affected in one-way or another – from sweet brown fizz drinks to popular software programs and Hollywood movies. However, keep in mind that not all aspects of the globalized consumer goods and popular culture are of superior quality, strictly speaking, and many of such products and cultural goods are promoted with subliminal marketing strategies some of which claim to even have “therapeutic effects” or involve seemingly spiritual or religious domain. But again a total rejection of popular culture and consumer products will not do. It is not advisable since in some ways we still depend on some of those products. But on the other hand, a careful selection is advisable because of economical, ecological and psychological reasons.

TU students of literature and art will be familiar with the work of the Thai poet and artist Angkarn Kalayanapong (1926 – 2012). A book about Angkarn is in the TU Library collection.

In the Journal of Southeast Asian Studies of September 1999, Voyages across the Web of Time: Angkarn, Nietzsche and Temporal Colonization was published. The Journal of Southeast Asian Studies is produced by the Department of History, National University of Singapore.

As its webpage states, it is

one of the principal outlets for scholarly articles on Southeast Asia (Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, East Timor, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam). Embracing a wide range of academic disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, the journal publishes manuscripts oriented toward a scholarly readership but written to be accessible to non-specialists. The extensive book review section includes works in Southeast Asian languages.

Voyages across the Web of Time: Angkarn, Nietzsche and Temporal Colonization was written by Ajarn Marc Weeks of Prince of Songkla University and Frédéric Maurel, an independent scholar. The article observes:

At first reckoning, the idea of comparing the Thai writer/artist Angkarn Kalayanaphong and the nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche seems imprudent, if not absurd. The work of Angkarn, a pre-eminent figure in Thai cultural life over the past four decades, affirms traditional and often overtly Buddhist values in the face of a perceived cultural threat posed by modern Western incursions into Thai life. Nietzsche’s writing, embodying forms of romantic Classicism and often identified as seminal Western modernism, is stridently atheistic and explicitly critical of Buddhist, along with Christian, metaphysics. Nevertheless, there are crucial areas in which the two betray distinct similarities and it is these, along with some significant points of divergence, that we wish to explore here. In particular we are interested in the way the experience of time itself, through economic pressure, undergoes radical change in both Angkarn’s Thailand and Nietzsche’s modern Europe, and in how the works of these two writers can be fruitfully read in comparison as responses to that phenomenon.

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)