American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas

by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen

While Nietzsche diagnosed the predicament of modern longing, he also showed the personality capable of overcoming it. Foster introduced Nietzsche as “the Prophet of a New Culture” whose life and thought heralded an exalted image of modern man. “Man as the goal, beauty as the form, life as the law, eternity as the content of our new day—this is Nietzsche’s message to the modern man.” He stressed that the path to higher spirituality cannot look “backward ” to inherited traditions, but must look “forward ” to a new imagined world of creative invention and discovery. He proclaimed, “A man is coming to be leader—a man who, as no other, embodies in himself all the pain and all the pleasure, all the sickness and all the convalescence, all the age and all the youth, of our tumultuous and tortured times: Friedrich Nietzsche