American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas

by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen

Both outside the academy and within, American readers turned to the Übermensch as a concept essential for understanding modern selfhood. Whereas popular authors, journalists, and social reformers typically cast the figure as an aggrandized self at war with society, philosophers, humanists, and social scientists within the academy understood the Übermensch as the self at war with itself. While few scholars thought it a salutary image of modern self-hood, they nevertheless recognized its value for testing the moral discourses of romanticism, naturalism, liberalism, and pragmatism.

In all three interpretations, the enemies of the Übermensch were the retrograde aspects of modern life: laissez-faire economics, the American plutocracy, repressive sexuality and gender roles, and the “slave morality” of bourgeois culture.

Once he had sufficiently dethroned Demos, he went on to attack Christian charity. According to Mencken, the Übermensch had the perspicacity to recognize, and the courage to accept, that Christian charity weakened the “race,” for it “maintain[ed] the useless at the expense of the strong.”

Although there were vibrant debates about how best to translate Übermensch, all seemed to agree that “man” was the appropriate translation for Mensch despite the fact that Mensch means “human being.” If rendered literally, Übermensch would be “over human being.”15

Jewish mensch

In order to conclude that “Nietzsche undoubtedly foresaw and welcomed the Super woman,” appreciative female readers were inspired by the vision of the perfected woman as “the mother of the transfigured man of the future.”18 However, fighting such an image of glorified motherhood is precisely what drew Margaret Sanger to the Übermensch. Sanger discovered in Nietzsche’s thought both a critical philosophy and an aspirational idea for achieving a woman’s right to bodily self-sovereignty. In her speeches and writings, she employed the Übermensch to critique the bankrupt Western morality that undergirded the repression of women by church and state as well as an image of a self worthy of idolatry once all idols were smashed. Feminine chastity, she argued, was an artifact of a desiccated “Christian … ascetic ideal,” which taught women to hide in shame from their earthly desires.

Sanger used Ubermensch for pro-choice feminism

Royce observed that modern reformers had discovered in Nietzsche’s thought a source of and justification for their overpowering iconoclastic individualism that threatened to tear the bonds of ethical and communal affiliation. However, he contended that the popular view of Nietzsche’s Übermensch as a tireless crusader against social conventions, which was popularized by Shaw, London, and Mencken and bandied about in the popular press, misunderstood Nietzsche’s broader vision. The “modern agitator,” the “typically restless child of our age,” noted Royce, believed that Nietzsche’s philosophy demanded the rejection of all ties to the community as debilitating social controls and outworn moral conventions.

he recognized in Nietzsche another philosopher who emphasized the important role temperament plays in determining one’s philosophical views and commitments. But it was likely James’s agreement with Nietzsche that philosophy is a confession of the author’s temperament that made it so awkward to find himself advancing a view of the nature of moral personhood strikingly similar to that of a philosopher whom he regarded as “pathetic and diseased.”

In his unpublished notes on ethics, James considered the rivalries between what he referred to as individual “high mindedness” and social “prudence.” While both make their contributions to society, he wondered whether it is a particular “high minded” type who ultimately propels humanity forward. He described him as the solitary, restless, immoderate “gentleman” who marries his private visions with personal sacrifice and social reality. James wrote,“We stumble on; the übermenschen plant a foot where there is no certain hold; & in the struggle that follows, the whole of us get dragged up after a fashion to the advanced position.” James justified this by explaining that what seems immoderate in one age may be the very idea that brings humanity along in the next: the private ideal becomes public good.

According to James (and finding confirmation in Nietzsche), there are no absolute ideal types of saintliness; virtues are relative to the beholder.“There is, in short, no absoluteness in the excellence of sainthood.”46 But more important, empiricism shows that while the saintly type might appeal in theory, in the real world we make ourselves “saintly” saints at our peril. James thus encouraged religious moderns to bring their religion a bit closer to earth.

In the early 1910s and 1920s, the New Humanists were among the most visible and vocal opponents of Nietzsche in the academy. The Übermensch surfaces repeatedly as their bête noire—a symbol for the degenerative impulses in romanticism and naturalism that they believed plagued modern life.

He argued that Nietzsche’s vision of self-overcoming would lead inexorably into an immoral self-abandonment—an abnegation both of the self and of the traditional anchors that bound the individual to eternal truths. Whereas Royce perceived self-overcoming to be a strengthening of the self and one’s moral resolve in an uncertain universe, Babbitt interpreted it to be a weakening of the self by succumbing to the whirl of modern lawlessness in the realm of ethics and aesthetics.

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.

Yet while the New Humanists argued that modern romanticism had a French lineage stemming back to Rousseau, Santayana argued instead that it was the most recent expression of a German idealistic egotism that dated to the Protestant Reforma-tion. Echoing the sentiments of early twentieth-century American Catholic thinkers and clergy, Santayana contended that German Protestantism was an unbridled celebration of individual will and a denial of the authority of the Gospels. He argued that German thinkers from Goethe and Kant down to Nietzsche had inherited Protestantism’s rejection of supernaturalism and its “rebellion against mediation in religion, against external authority, and against dogma,” to spiritualize what was truly their secular exaltation of the self.

Although Santayana viewed art as vital to human experience, he believed that it contributed to life only if it was the work of the “trained” artist who had ensured that the lines of a poem or the brushstrokes of a painting corresponded to “prescribed” standards of aesthetic form. In Santayana’s estimation, this submission to externally sanctioned ideals was reprehensible to the German philosopher: “To be trained is to be tamed and harnessed, an accession of power detestable to Nietzsche.”

Drawing on their prewar critiques of the romantic origins of modern relativism and its dangerous consequences for civilization, Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More argued that Nietzsche’s frenzied irrationalism and celebration of will-to-power had spiraled into German racialist superiority and a “lust of empire.”

One of the strongest objections came from William James’s brother-in-law, William Mackintire Salter, himself a prolific writer and speaker on ethics, as well as an early follower of Felix Adler, the German-Jewish founder of the Ethical Culture movement, and the leader of the Society for Ethical Culture of Chicago. Salter, once an aspiring Congregational minister who rejected Christian orthodoxy and turned to Unitarianism before his faith in the “solid grounds for distinctive Christian faith” fully gave way, discovered in Nietzsche a fellow antifoundationalist ethicist who took a higher humanity—not a religious tradition’s or a national culture’s narrow view of it—as his cause.

Now the excessive worldliness of German Protestantism appeared to be too much of a good thing, as German theologians and clergy saw themselves as functionaries of the German state and had politicized Protestant theology by making it serviceable to the nation’s military mission.

Barth was against this

Cognizant that the war had justly soured the US perception of German political life, the economist Simon Nelson Patten sought to rescue the German welfare-state model, which he believed was still worthy of emulation. In contrast to the view of the German Übermensch as a disintegrative social force, Patten offered a countervision of a “super race,” as reflected in Germany’s mechanization, efficiency, and social morality.91 According to Patten, the Übermensch, properly understood, represented a bridge between the American conception of freedom and the German regard for social organization. He argued that whereas the Anglo-American mind conceived of liberty as political freedom from tyrants and exploitation, the German conception of liberty was cultural rather than political, referring to “the overthrow of religious dogmatism, of ancient superstition, of social arrogance, of effete traditions, and of conventional morality.” Whereas liberty to the Anglo-American mind was a political concept that has “no content but freedom from control,” the Germans balanced their regard for intellectual freedom with esteem for social progress.

figures as diverse as Emma Goldman, H. L. Mencken, and Randolph Bourne mined Nietzsche’s texts for his critique of Judeo-Christian asceticism and moral psychology as they attempted to come to terms with the lingering influence of Puritanism on modern American thought.

Emerson’s longing for a society of “complete” men and women, his belief that the poet is the full realization of the thinker and the artist in man, helps explain why American socialists and Progressives who cared deeply about social solidarity insisted on Nietzsche as the exemplar of the philosopher-poet.

Even strict materialist socialists who focused on bread-and-butter labor issues could turn to Nietzsche for the inspiration to imagine themselves laboring toward a new poetics of humanity. Nowhere do we better see this than with the radical West Indian–American writer Hubert Harrison, founder of the “New Negro” movement. An avid reader of Nietzsche—from his time as a postal worker and freelance editorialist and lecturer in his early twenties through his involvement in the Socialist Party, as a lecturer at the Ferrer Modern School (a hothouse for American Nietzscheanism),19 and into the 1920s as the intellectual “Father of Harlem Radicalism” —Harrison drew on Nietzsche’s philosophy as he hammered out his own. Like so many white aspiring young writers of his day, Harrison discovered in Nietzsche a model of the freelance, freethinking, autonomous intellectual he aspired to become.

Black Nietzschean

John Gould Fletcher, the imagist poet and essayist, first came across Nietzsche’s Zarathustra while he was a student at Harvard: “All through 1904–5 I absorbed it in large doses, reading Nietzsche day after day at the Harvard Union, and dreaming about the superman at night.” This intimacy with Nietzsche drew him away from the Christianity of his boyhood and toward poetry, as even the godless “must believe in something” ; if there were indeed no God, then it would be up to the poets to create new images of the possible.

Taking delight in discussing Nietzsche’s ideas, the radicals also treasured volumes of his work among their personal possessions, and his books figured prominently in their gifts to one another. In their desire to institute the collective control of the nation’s economic production, they shared a thinker who showed them that the real wealth of any commonwealth is its native intellect. Giving a Nietzsche volume to someone symbolized socialist solidarity, as Mabel Dodge Luhan demonstrated when she gave the young IWW organizer Frank Tannenbaum a copy of Nietzsche to bolster his political will as he served a one-year jail term for leading a protest of unemployed workers.

Goldman had first read selections from Nietzsche in Reitzel’s Arme Teufel, and although she was very intrigued, it was not until studying in Vienna in 1895 that she had a chance to systematically read his works. She reveled in her discovery of the “magic of [Nietzsche’s] language, the beauty of his vision, [which] carried me to undreamed-of heights.” She wanted to share with Brady her “raptures over Nietzsche.” But Brady mocked her fascination with “the great poet-philosopher,” unwilling to concede that his aristocratic radicalism might have anything to offer philosophical anarchism. They fought over Nietzsche despite Brady’s protests that “Nietzsche is not worth it.” Feeling “wounded to the heart,” Goldman responded, “It isn’t Nietzsche, it is you.”

By turning to Nietzsche, these avant-garde writers were participating in the Emersonian practice of looking to Europe for intellectual models. Although Emerson had longed for an America that cultivated its own native intellect, one that no longer feasted off the remains of Europe, his Representative Men was a confession that the culture of American democracy may never pull this off.

There were plenty of European “geniuses” for Americans to turn to, but Nietzsche especially spoke to their romance with independence from institutions and their consequent anxiety of being marginalized. He helped those like Stearns, who sought intellectual freedom yet disliked its consequences: “In our national life to-day the young intellectual speedily finds that he is not wanted.”49 If genius has a history, so too does the hero worship of the alienated genius; and it is this iteration of the young intellectuals’ cult of genius that helps explain how the ground for the romance with Nietzsche in the twentieth century was laid in the nineteenth.50 As we have seen, the early twentieth-century Nietzsche vogue had a broad cultural scope, and was not limited to professional or aspiring thinkers and writers. But for the young intellectuals, it was Nietzsche’s role as a freelance philosopher without institutional support, affiliation, or recognition that had particular appeal.

Nietzsche’s own writings about genius helped flesh out the stillforming notion of the freelance thinker. He characterized genius as antagonistic to all traditional sources of authority, hence hostile to moral complacency, and he argued that society is equally hostile to it in return. However, Nietzsche also emphasized the geniality of intolerance for the genius. “Mutilation, crippling, [and] a serious deficiency in an organ offers the occasion for an uncommonly successful development of another organ,” he argued.“It is in this way one can suppose many a glittering talent to have originated.”53 According to Nietzsche, the formation of a genius requires not just social intolerance but self-sacrifice. The “greatness” of the genius is that “he expends himself … he uses himself up, he does not spare himself ” in his “devotion to an idea, a great cause.” While he gives himself freely in the pursuit of a higher aim, society thanks him with its all-too-human “gratitude” : it misunderstands him.54 Brilliance. Greatness. Alienation. Genius

According to Cook, Nietzsche pushed his mind toward insanity knowingly and willingly. His madness was no accident, it was martyrdom. Nietzsche “would have been willing to pay the price had he known in advance that it was to be the loss of reason,” Cook wrote. He knew that a new world of ideas worth living for would also be worth dying for; mental death was the price.

N as Jesus

Of all the figures Nietzsche was likened to—modern mystic, Christ, Faust, Prometheus—the one that resonated the most was Nietzsche as a present-day Hamlet. The unfulfilled longings and haunted imagination, which thrust him into madness, recalled the tragic fate that befell Shakespeare’s Danish prince. Comparing Nietzsche to Hamlet would remain a perennial feature of Nietzsche interpretation in the United States among thinkers reflecting on the perils of their enterprise.

The Hamlet-Nietzsche metaphor for genius revealed their alienation from—and ambivalence toward—the modern democratic public culture they wanted to serve and to lead. The spectacle of Nietzsche laboring in silence, and ultimately collapsing beneath the burden of his refused genius, resonated with a number of intellectuals who perceived themselves as similarly marginalized by an American culture indifferent to their ideas.

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.”

If, as Nietzsche argued, moral language is not an expression of universal truth but rather an instrument to serve particular social functions, then it would be their role as critics of American values to investigate how, for example, modern-day Christians and laissez-faire capitalists used words as strongholds to defend or justify their religious traditions and aggrandized wealth. The young intellectuals were committed to progressive reform and cultural renewal but also to the belief that neither God nor natural law demanded that they be so. In A Preface to Politics (1913), Walter Lippmann used Nietzsche’s insights to imagine a democratic theory without foundations. To do so, he first sought to demonstrate that political and economic discourse, though grounded in claims of universality, had no such recourse to absolutes. He argued that political commitments, even democratic ones, were informed by human temperament, not by rationality. To understand politics, we should analyze people’s psychological longings, their aesthetic tastes, even their irrational impulses, more than the first principles they espouse. Nietzsche had argued that dogmas are no more than “instruments of human purposes.” What a culture identifies as moral, therefore, is really just “an effort to find a way of living which men who live it will instinctively feel is good.”

Lippmann sums up politics

moral indeterminacy could place heavy demands on the individual, however. Indeed, as Emma Goldman admitted, it “urges man to think.” While Goldman stressed that “perfect personality” could be realized once moderns liberate their minds from “man-made law” and “truth grown false with age,” she also insisted that they would prefer gilding their cages to breaking free of them. Though the masses would be the first to benefit from recognizing how religious and even supposedly democratic ideals espoused in American public life were instruments of internecine terror rather than divine commandments, they were the least likely to do so. The beneficiaries of industrial capitalism manufacture the fictional idol of the free market, for example, but it is the masses who willingly worship it. To demonstrate how the common people were their own tormentors, Goldman went to some of the unlikeliest passages in Nietzsche’s writings. She turned, for example, to Nietzsche’s maxim, “When you go to woman, take the whip along,” to demonstrate how even liberated suffragists couldn’t get liberation right. According to Goldman, suffragists grounded their arguments for voting rights on the very outmoded essentialist ideas of female purity and virtue that had subjugated them. If woman is a “purist,” Goldman argued, it is only because she has become “bigoted and relentless in her effort to make others as good as she thinks they ought to be.” The daily workings of Christian ressentiment in American cultu...

For Hubert Harrison, it was bad enough to have poverty (the result of an exploitative capitalist system) put a lock on your mind, but it was even worse to have your own religion do it. This was, in his view, the most powerful insight Nietzsche’s genealogy of the slave morality offered to African Americans. Nietzsche helped him see that African Americans especially should liberate themselves from the “dubious blessings of Christianity,” and breathe the larger air of “Freethought.” He believed, however, that they were the least likely to do so because “the church saw to it that [Christianity] taught to slaves should stress the servile virtues of subservience and content[ment], and these things have bitten deeply into the souls of black folk.” Making matters worse, Harrison argued, the chastened, meek sensibility of Christianity created a timid intellectual “conservatism in [n]egroes.” Nietzsche’s “slave morality” thus revealed a slave mentality in the African Americans’“sphere of ideas” : Nietzsche’s contention that the ethics of Christianity are the slave’s ethics would seem to be justified in this instance. Show me a population that is deeply religious, and I will show you a servile population, content with whips and chains … content to eat the bread of sorrow and drink the waters of affliction. The present condition of the Negroes of America is a touching bit of testimony to the truth of this assertion. It was Nietzsche who helped Harrison explain how Christianity for Afr...

While today it is commonplace to bewail the puritanical prudery and provincialism of American culture, the Puritans didn’t always have such a bad reputation. Only when early twentieth-century critics like Goldman, Mencken, and Bourne started to excavate the past for the historical conditions conspiring against the free intellect did the modern conception of the Puritan develop. The radicals collapsed Nietzsche’s analyses of Christian asceticism and sentimentalism into a critique of the lingering effects of Puritan psychology and piety. While the philistines treated ideas as if they were merely decorative, the Puritan viewed them as disciplinary. In their efforts to find a usable past to critique what they regarded as a culture of rigid moralizing, the radicals discovered the wrathful “Puritan” who policed free thought, hounded liberated spirits, and damaged the free play of personality. Goldman popularized the latter-day Puritan as the ascetic guardian of public morality who sought to protect young girls’ sexuality by denying it.

Her concern, though, was not simply with the modern Puritan’s denials of earthly pleasures, but rather the toll that a despiritualized Christian morality—what she referred to as the “narrow puritanic spirit” —takes on the life of the mind. “Aspirit which is absolutely blind to the simplest manifestations of life; hence stands for stagnation and decay,” she argued, can only produce an intellectual life that is fearful, wrathful, and “steeped in the densest provincialism.” Social conservatives were not its only victims. Indeed, social progressives “apparently free from religious and social spooks” are intellectually “as prostrate as the most pious of their kind” before the idol of absolute morality.

Emma Goldman noted both cons and wokes were Puritanical

In his 1917 essay “Puritanism as a Literary Force,” Mencken sought the origins of modern American literature’s didactic style, which was devoid of difficult ideas as well as literary nuance, play, or depth. His genealogy of American anti-intellectualism followed many of the same lines as Santayana’s and Brooks’s. It began with the austere, self-accusing Calvinist of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, who lost his dominance with the rise of his nineteenth-century descendant, the philistine, a “trader” or “peasant” in Mencken’s version. The philistine is at home in this world but never strays beyond the practical. In fact, neither the Puritan nor the philistine has any sensitivity to the play of ideas, Mencken felt—the Puritan because he fears its seductive powers, the philistine because he is utterly deaf to it.

During the Victorian period, the old Puritanism lost its hold on individual conscience, but its zealotry remained. The once self-accusing sinners in the hands of an angry God were now self-righteous zealots on the prowl for souls to torment. Neo-Puritanism, Mencken argued, explained the modern American: His enthusiasm was not for repentance, but for what he began to call service. In brief, the national sense of energy and fitness gradually superimposed itself upon the national Puritanism, and from that marriage sprung a keen Wille zur Macht, a lusty will to power. The American Puritan, by now, was not content with the rescue of his own soul; he felt an irresistible impulse to hand salvation on, to disperse and multiply it, to ram it down reluctant throats, to make it free, universal and compulsory. Mencken’s genealogy showed what was possible when American intellectual history was pressed through Nietzsche’s terminology and reassembled by the hands of an angry critic. According to Mencken, the errand into the wilderness had gone terribly awry. From Puritanism to philistinism to a “bellicose” intellectual style that regards its Sklavenmoral as “universal and compulsory” —this was American intellectual history. And it explained its intellectual poverty.90

Woke as Puritanism

Bourne agreed with Nietzsche that modern ethics had become tired expressions of nineteenth-century sentimentalism: “We have become enfeebled by humanitarianism… . Sympathy in place of justice saps the fibre of character and gives free rein to egoistic impulses.”100 Bourne concluded with Nietzsche that sympathy and selflessness do not represent the effacement of the aggrandized self but are rather expressions of it. He argued that even acts of supposed goodwill are really“will to power” strategies, for the act of giving is merely an assertion of our superiority over the person we are supposedly trying to help.

Altruism was power (like Rand later said)

Drawing the line of argument straight from Nietzsche, Bourne argued that it is a mistake for his fellow critics to dismiss the Puritan’s asceticism as “unnatural,” because the entire force of the puritanical belief structure is the way it burrows into the individual’s moral psychology and becomes “secondnature.” As Bourne put it, the externalized dictates of religion over time become naturalized into the believer’s entire ethical and psychological gestalt. As a result,“the puritan becomes just as much of a naturalistic phenomenon as the most carnal sinner.”

Like Emerson and Nietzsche before him, Bourne was troubled about the prospect of inheritance always having the last word, the prospect that we are always inhibited in ways often invisible to us, either from birth or by our upbringing, so that our assertions of self are merely the rattling of our cages. Though Bourne refused to give in to the myth of the given, he argued that people internalize the dictates of society and only “dimly realize that their outward lives are largely a compulsion of social habit.” Although he insisted that “there is nothing fixed about the objects to which society demands conformity,” we are trained to be pious to our inherited moral ideals as if they were universal and transcendent. Although we try to outdistance them, we “have never overtaken the given.” The net effect, he argued, is that “this divorce between social compulsion and personal desire … rarely rises to consciousness.”

Lippmann, Walling, and Bourne best expressed this enthusiasm about the parallels between Nietzsche, James, and Dewey. They praised the experimental approach to knowledge and social problems advocated by all three philosophers. And they delighted in the common argument that knowledge is created, not inherited—made, not found. The critics applied this logic to argue that historical knowledge, scientific formulas, and cultural conventions are true only insofar as they are life-affirming and heighten humankind’s sense of the possible. In addition, Nietzsche and the pragmatists stressed that man is the maker of his universe.

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.

Fans young and old, male and female, pious and agnostic, from the Left and from the Right, immigrant and native born, sent letters expressing their admiration for Nietzsche. Like Hintz, they requested a picture or an autograph, or simply testified in haunting and exquisite detail how reading his philosophy transformed their views of themselves and their world. They showed how Nietzsche helped them critique the religion of their youth, the intellectual poverty of their democratic culture, and the materialism of their consumer society. They documented the media through which they had access to Nietzsche (identifying translations, compendia, and articles) as well as the places they could find them (such as the local library or antiquarian bookstore). Likewise, many conveyed their devotion to Nietzsche in expressly religious terms, referring to the way “He” saved them from despair and how they found new meaning in “His” prophetic utterances.

Nietzsche had given her justification for, and a language to articulate, her feelings of displacement and disaffection in a world that seemed content with ugly compromises. His philosophy gained traction in readers yearning for individuality as well as belonging. In their desire for self-understanding, they fashioned their own version of Nietzsche as the exemplar of individuality and a new self in that image.

Nietzsche’s more dominant appeal lay in how he sanctioned readers’ feelings of radical otherness—feelings that traversed ethnic, racial, class, and gender divides. As Werner Sollors reminds us, “In America, casting oneself as an outsider may in fact be considered a dominant cultural trait.”

That Nietzsche’s philosophy could shrink the distance between German and American culture was the last thing on many of his American readers’ minds. Though they were reading Nietzsche in the United States, they never thought his philosophy would find refuge here, nor did they desire it. They simply wanted more of Nietzsche, more of the German pathos of distance, more of his philosophy with which to shield themselves from the crude, anti-intellectual mob mentality of American life.

Even for those who came to Nietzsche with a sense of being human, all too human, he showed them a pathos of distance from everyday values—whether of the church, the marketplace, or the civics lesson—that helped them sharpen their sense of distinction in themselves, enabling them to feel their own particularity. And the letter shows how Nietzsche’s readers yearned for a philosophy that harmonized thinking and doing.

Kaufmann also employed Nietzsche to address what he regarded as the impoverished status of philosophy in midcentury American life. In his estimation, the “parting of the ways” in transatlantic philosophy that split continental European and English-speaking philosophers into two antagonistic groups hampered the proper reception of Nietzsche in American universities and damaged moral inquiry in general.7 Rather than ascribe Nietzsche to either the Continental or the Anglo-analytic tradition, Kaufmann sought to extend the reach of Nietzsche’s significance by demonstrating how his philosophy resonated with both.

Scholars generally agree that in order to distance Nietzsche from Nazism, Kaufmann transformed Nietzsche into a charming and inoffensive salonfähig existentialist, erasing the darker elements of his philosophy of power and neutralizing his attacks on liberal ideals.