American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas

by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen

Nietzsche not only endured suffering, he theorized about it. As he wrote in Untimely Meditations (1873–76), the cultural philistine “fancies that he is himself a son of the muses and a man of culture,” while the great thinker is a seeker. The philistine thus thinks he possesses that which the true genius seeks: “a genuine, original … culture.”69 Bourne identified this as the problem of the American mind—not the cultural hostility to the critical intellect but “the uncritical hospitality of current taste.” He saw a danger in the sunny gentility that marked American cultural attitudes, which was deadly for the artist. As he put it,“The real enemy is still the genteel tradition which tends to smother the timid experiments of a younger generation that is not satisfied with husks. For the deadly virus of gentility is carried along by an up-to-date cultivated public—small perhaps, but growing—who are all the more dangerous because they are so hospitable.”