American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas

by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen

In their common efforts to identify Rousseau as the origin and Nietzsche as the consequence of the romantic revolt against classicism, the critical New Humanists failed to notice that the two thinkers were awkward representatives of the alpha and omega of naturalist and instrumental tendencies in modern thought. By linking Nietzsche with Rousseau and Rousseau with an unbridled celebration of nature, they overlooked Nietzsche’s sustained critiques of the French thinker—critiques that anticipated their own attacks on naturalism. Beginning with The Birth of Tragedy and culminating in The Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche repeatedly criticized what he perceived to be Rousseau’s innocent exaltation of nature as paradise. Nature, for Nietzsche, was neither the model nor the source of egalitarianism and fraternity that Rousseau believed it to be. Nietzsche emphasized that because nature is rife with conflict, pain, and ecstasy as well as harmony, balance, and order, human beings must unleash their rhapsodic Dionysian urges, not as a substitute but as a counterweight to the Apollonian tendencies toward order and restraint.