American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas

by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen

Since the mid-nineteenth century, virtually all fields of thought were moving toward scientific verification and away from speculative thought. It was this rigidly positivistic atmosphere that Nietzsche’s writings in the 1870s and 1880s stridently opposed. However, the thinker who Urban discovered in the pages of Genealogy did not advise returning philosophy to the speculative realm of metaphysics. Metaphysics and positivism represented, for Nietzsche, opposing sides of the same coin: both were grounded in the principle of universal truth. Metaphysics rested on the belief in timeless foundations of universal values, whereas positivism assumed the universality of the scientific method and objectivity. Nietzsche posed his philosophical anthropology in opposition to both the older and the newer trends in thought. Urban discovered in Nietzsche a thinker who rejected the search for both the metaphysical and the natural foundations of truth and values, and sought instead to examine the human origins, cultural genealogy, and value of values.