Roopen Majithia’s book aims to bring Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (EN) and the Bhagavad Gītā (BG) into philosophical conversation, focusing on ethics, agency, and the good life. After some important methodological reflections (on which more below), this ambitious study is organised into three thematic parts, each of which allocates roughly equal space to the voices of the EN and the BG. While some sections succeed more fully than others, the project as a whole contributes meaningfully to the growing literature on cross-cultural philosophy. The volume is well produced, with only a few typos here and there—most of them in the Greek and Sanskrit transliterations.
This review first outlines the book’s structure and arguments before turning to a critical evaluation. Majithia devotes the first substantial section of the book (Chapters 2–5) to examining the form and intentionality of moral action, focusing on why we act, rather than what we should do. Both texts take it to be a requirement for ethically good action that the agent does what is right for its own sake—or at least not for the sake of personal benefit (think of Aristotle’s distinction between doing what is virtuous and doing it virtuously). However, the chapters comprising this part are perhaps best characterised as detailing the moral psychology that we find in the two texts. Chapters 2-3 go through the apparatus Aristotle requires to explain what it takes to act virtuously: desire, wish, deliberation, choice, disposition and a character that unites reason, emotion and appetite in the right way. Similarly, Chapters 4-5 give an account of the moral psychology of agency in the BG. Initially, “the doer” (kartā) is analysed into intellect, mind, and I-sense, a tripartition that interestingly differs from Aristotle’s non-rational, sub-rational and rational aspects (or parts) of the soul. The guṇa theory further refines the view: the configuration of these three basic strands—sattva (purity/lucidity), rajas (activity), and tamas (inertia) —helps explain a person’s moral character and tendencies. The predominance of one over the others shapes not only what actions one is inclined toward but also how one performs them. The section ends with a Coda in which Majithia compares and contrasts the positions developed so far. Both texts are centrally concerned with the “therapy of desire”: in the EN, the good person flourishes when his desires are properly developed, whereas the BG ultimately aims at the extinction of desire and the dissolution of the agent (p. 102).
The second part concerns what we should do and why. Chapter 6, on the EN, navigates a sensible course between prescriptive rules encoded in law and the judgement of the good person. Invoking Aristotle’s political naturalism here also helps to locate the place of the individual agent in relation to the society to which he must belong. This theme gains further momentum in the discussion of dharma (“duty”). The BG is framed in terms of a dilemma of conflicting duties: qua warrior the protagonist Arjuna is supposed to fight and kill the enemy, but qua human, he must not kill his kin on the other side of the battlefield. It takes three chapters (4, 5, 7) to develop Krishna’s answer fully. As Arjuna’s advisor, he counsels that where dharma seems to conflict, giving priority to world-welfare is key to determining right action in his situation (pp. 132, 136)—which Majithia interprets as a consequentialist approach. The Coda following these chapters again brings out some similarities and differences in approach to ethics. Perhaps the most interesting point concerns the connection between the highest good and the primacy of doing what is right (pp. 150-1). Roughly, even if there might be higher goods than acting well, doing one’s duty has practical priority because it is part of the conditions under which others can pursue the highest good—be it liberation from rebirth (mokṣa) or theoretical contemplation (theōria). This point about the primacy of care for the community deserves more elaboration than it receives here or in the Conclusion.
The third and most interesting part concerns the role of metaphysical knowledge in relation to the highest good—happiness in the case of the EN and freedom (mokṣa) in the case of the BG (hence the subtitle of the book). Reversing the order of exposition, Chapter 8 examines the kind of knowledge needed to attain freedom (mokṣa) in the BG. This liberation is achieved through detachment, which can be pursued on three distinct paths (yoga): wisdom, action or devotion. Their shared core consists in the knowledge required for freedom—a kind of self-knowledge, as it turns out. Once the agent fully understands what he is and how he relates to brahman, ātman and nature, concern for personal gain, or any special concern for oneself, expires—and one is free. Chapter 9—the best-researched in my view—now fully makes the case that the best life (in the EN) contains activities of both practical and theoretical wisdom, where the latter—contemplation—is understood as akin to God’s eternal activity of thinking. One interesting implication of this is the difference in accessibility. Both texts stress that knowledge is the key to the highest good. However, Aristotle leaves no doubt that only few are cut out for a contemplative life. The BG, Majithia argues, is less elitist insofar as all ways of life within the orthodox fold can attain freedom (p. 210).
The book ends with two appendices. Appendix 1 offers a brief overview of some basic Aristotelian distinctions, including potentiality and actuality, and substance and attribute. Appendix 2 provides contextual material for the Bhagavad Gītā, including key features of its cultural and societal background. Since this is helpful for readers less familiar with the Indian tradition, it might have been more effective if placed earlier in the book, before the chapters on the Gītā. In fact, a corresponding appendix outlining the social and political background of classical Greece would also have been valuable for those less familiar with this background, especially given the recurring theme of the relationship between individual and society.
Majithia’s book contributes to a growing field of scholarship bringing classical Greek and Indian texts into conversation. Having participated in such a project, I find this kind of comparative work both exciting and fruitful—when done well.[1] Rather than questioning the value of the cross-cultural enterprise itself, I want to consider a more targeted question: does the book succeed as a unified project, or is it simply a set of parallel readings? In other words, is the whole greater than the sum of its parts? A positive answer may take either of two routes: philologically-minded readers would want to know what we learn about each text that we would have missed, were it not for Majithia’s book. More philosophically-minded readers might want to know what we learn about the highest good by looking at it from these two different perspectives.
Let us begin by considering the parts. Many of the individual chapters are competent and occasionally insightful. I found the chapters on the Bhagavad Gītā more engaging because its comparative brevity (around 700 verses) allows for more sustained attention to key concepts such as detachment. Still, the level of scholarship and interpretive ambition tends to fall below what one might expect from a specialist monograph focused on just one of these texts. For instance, while Majithia presents Aristotle’s views on virtue, character and happiness with clarity, readers working on Aristotelian ethics or politics will find little in the way of new interpretations or new justifications for established ones. This observation points to the book’s contribution. Its likely audience is not the rare scholar equally at home in both Greek and Indian traditions, but rather those with expertise in one and an interest in the other. From this perspective, the value lies not in novelty of interpretation but in the achievement of bringing the two texts together in a careful and focused way. While the early chapters on moral psychology are largely preparatory and less exciting on their own, the book’s comparative perspective gradually becomes more rewarding, offering thought-provoking reflections on shared themes such as desire, duty, and knowledge. In this sense, the volume’s cumulative effect is greater than the sum of its parts.
But what exactly is this effect, and how does it come about? The answer lies in the book’s specific approach to bringing the two texts into conversation. In his reflections on method, Majithia sensibly reflects on the nature of a philosophical conversation—but makes one significant and questionable assumption: he thinks that conversation as a mode of philosophy cannot easily be construed to be concerned with the truth. That assumption shapes much of what follows. The chapters focus almost entirely on exegesis—an admirable task in itself—and hardly ever pause to think why a certain position should be true or to assess and evaluate the argument. This approach naturally raises worries about incommensurability: are the texts not too different in approach and content to be brought into genuine conversation?
While Majithia allays some of these concerns, the problem would hardly arise if he were to embrace a more Platonic approach to conversation, where the interlocutors hold each other accountable in the search of truth or at least argument. This, I suspect, would make the pairing of the EN and the BG more powerful. This comes out nicely on one of the few occasions where such a moment of genuine engagement occurs. As part of his account of the highest good in the BG, Majithia pauses to ask what would happen if ‘Arjuna ended up like Priam: defeated, bereft, and broken’—a condition that would seem to ‘affect his pursuit of freedom’ (p. 213). In the EN, misfortune deprives Priam from happiness, even if he may retain his virtue. Majithia illuminates the BG by considering why such a misfortune need not distance the agent from the highest good, since he would, ideally, respond to misfortune with insight and understanding that could further loosen the grip of the self, and thus bring the agent even closer to freedom.
This, then, is where I think the pay-off lies: the genuine philosophical exchange between the Nicomachean Ethics and the Bhagavad Gītā unfolds less on the page than in the mind of the reader. The book’s real strength may lie not in the direct comparisons it offers—which are brief and mostly confined to codas and a short concluding chapter—but in how it sets the two texts side by side, clarifies their respective agendas, and highlights where they stand on key ethical questions. In doing so, it creates the conditions for a dialogue the reader can pursue or imagine. The volume is thought-provoking in precisely this way, and it invites further reflection on themes such as the role of virtue and knowledge in attaining the highest good.
One fruitful direction for future work might be to examine more closely this shared theme. Both texts emphasise the liberating power of knowledge: in the Gītā, the right kind of knowledge transforms the agent from being attached to his individual perspective to becoming detached and truly free; and in the Greek tradition, knowledge is similarly presented as transformative—one need only think of Plato’s Cave. Would a deeper engagement with this idea shed new light on the Nicomachean Ethics? Becoming a virtuous agent goes hand in hand with becoming practically wise. But a reader of the Gītā might reasonably wonder whether theoretical insight—not just practical wisdom—transforms the virtuous agent’s understanding or experience of acting well. Does it reshape one’s desires? Deepen one’s sense of what is fine or good? Alter one’s conception of the self? Whatever the answer, a discussion along these lines would be genuinely illuminating. It is to the credit of Majithia’s book that it lays the groundwork for just such a conversation.
Notes
[1] Amber Carpenter and Pierre-Julien Harter, Crossing the Stream, Leaving the Cave: Buddhist -Platonist Philosophical Inquiries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024).