American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas

by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen

The radicals discovered in Nietzsche an image of the apostolic thinker that reminded them of what Emerson had had in mind in “Circles” when he claimed, “Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. Then all things are at risk.”118 Nietzsche’s model was an apostolic thinker who did not hoist himself onto the empty throne of a dead God or offer his own texts as a new New Testament, but rather posed, as Nietzsche had, the momentous question to himself and his readers: “Could you think a God?”119 What they longed for were good models of the antifoundational intellect who helped them tear up the cultural wreckage of their modern America, but also helped them imagine new moral possibilities that could outshoot reality.