American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas

by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen

Kaufmann’s Nietzsche is a counter-Nietzsche to Adorno’s. Adorno’s negativist Nietzsche was forced from a settled life and clear career path in Germany. Kaufmann’s Nietzsche was formulated while a student in America. Adorno’s Nietzsche relentlessly criticized the Enlightenment. Kaufmann’s Nietzsche exemplified its unrealized promises. Adorno’s Nietzsche thought the ra tional self parroted instrumental virtues. Kaufmann’s Nietzsche considered the rational self the seat of all morality. For Adorno, Nietzsche was above all a homeless dialectician who would have never succumbed to unity as “stylized barbarity,” while Kaufmann’s Nietzsche was a “dialectical monist,” whose ideas and literary style all tracked back to a unified whole.45 Whereas the other émigrés’ Nietzsche made more inroads than Adorno’s, none accomplished this feat as completely and comprehensively as Kaufmann’s. In the suffocating en-vironment of cold war culture, Americans were ready for a liberating thinker who helped them breathe larger air. Kaufmann’s Nietzsche offered them that: a philosopher of a Dionysian Enlightenment, not a totalitarian one.