American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas

by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen

Like Emerson and Nietzsche before him, Bourne was troubled about the prospect of inheritance always having the last word, the prospect that we are always inhibited in ways often invisible to us, either from birth or by our upbringing, so that our assertions of self are merely the rattling of our cages. Though Bourne refused to give in to the myth of the given, he argued that people internalize the dictates of society and only “dimly realize that their outward lives are largely a compulsion of social habit.” Although he insisted that “there is nothing fixed about the objects to which society demands conformity,” we are trained to be pious to our inherited moral ideals as if they were universal and transcendent. Although we try to outdistance them, we “have never overtaken the given.” The net effect, he argued, is that “this divorce between social compulsion and personal desire … rarely rises to consciousness.”