American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas

by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen

The émigrés shared a very different Nietzsche from the one celebrated as the official philosopher of the Nazis; indeed, their Nietzsche was Hitler’s forced exile.

It was Nietzsche’s Zarathustra that Tillich had turned to as a twenty-nine-year old military chaplain with the German army stationed in France, to make sense of the unspeakable death and carnage around him. Nietzsche helped him see that in man’s worship of false institutions the “God of theism” was dead, because modern man, in his arrogance, had killed Him. Throughout the 1920s and into his exile in the United States, Tillich continued to draw from Nietzsche as he encouraged other searching moderns to “shak[e] … the foundations” of official religion grown sinful from its separation from “the Ground of Being,” the “Protestant Principle” to challenge any institutional authority against speaking for religious absolutes, the “Courage to Be” free of a hollow piety, and to reach for the “God above the God of theism.”

When the older émigrés utilized Nietzsche to reappraise their personal situations, or to protest the horrors committed in his name, they did so by looking backto a Nietzsche who was part of their own German identity, a part of their German past, a part of their homeland, which was no longer their home. Though Kaufmann, too, associated Nietzsche with the German philosophical culture from which he came, his relationship with him began where he began—as a US citizen, a new scholar for a new world.

Dialectic, Adorno and Horkheimer drew heavily on Nietzsche’s critique of the Enlightenment to challenge the conventional view of its legacies as progress. The Enlightenment’s unwarranted esteem for human rationality, they argued, did not simply lead to the “disenchantment of the world” —it sowed the seeds of its own destruction. By exalting the limitless power of instrumental rationality, the Enlightenment cultivated an ideology in which nothing lay beyond the power of human apprehension, domination, and administration. The “administered world” of Nazism, then, represented the realization, not the abandonment, of the Enlightenment: the “Enlightenment is totalitarian.”

Kaufmann’s Nietzsche is a counter-Nietzsche to Adorno’s. Adorno’s negativist Nietzsche was forced from a settled life and clear career path in Germany. Kaufmann’s Nietzsche was formulated while a student in America. Adorno’s Nietzsche relentlessly criticized the Enlightenment. Kaufmann’s Nietzsche exemplified its unrealized promises. Adorno’s Nietzsche thought the ra tional self parroted instrumental virtues. Kaufmann’s Nietzsche considered the rational self the seat of all morality. For Adorno, Nietzsche was above all a homeless dialectician who would have never succumbed to unity as “stylized barbarity,” while Kaufmann’s Nietzsche was a “dialectical monist,” whose ideas and literary style all tracked back to a unified whole.45 Whereas the other émigrés’ Nietzsche made more inroads than Adorno’s, none accomplished this feat as completely and comprehensively as Kaufmann’s. In the suffocating en-vironment of cold war culture, Americans were ready for a liberating thinker who helped them breathe larger air. Kaufmann’s Nietzsche offered them that: a philosopher of a Dionysian Enlightenment, not a totalitarian one.

Kaufmann thought that despite Nietzsche’s reputation for making “self-contradictory” claims in his writings, when placed in the larger context of his philosophy, his ideas about power, self-sovereignty, and intellectual integrity exhibited a synthetic unity.

For Kaufmann, Nietzsche’s existentialism is best understood when we consider him to be a “problem-thinker,” not a “system-thinker,” and that his use of aphorism was his way of “‘living through’ each problem.” By insisting that aphorism is not an abandonment but a realization of the serious inquiry into the problems of living, that it is not an “anarchy of atoms” but an experimental form for a philosophy of life, Kaufmann connected the dots: “Life does indeed reside in the whole of Nietzsche’s thinking and writing, and there is a unity which is obscured, but not obliterated, by the apparent discontinuity in his experimentalism.”

He described “the urgency of [Nietzsche’s] task” : after the death of God, when divine explanations are untenable and naturalistic explanations fail to give human experience any dignity or meaning, the solitary individual must confront his awesome aloneness in an indifferent universe.51 Nihilism is no option, for it is simply a retreat into wornout habits of thought characterized by the conviction that the world is only meaningful if it has one meaning. Kaufmann tentatively and even cautiously defined these elements of Nietzsche’s thought as existential.

Anglo-American philosophers had grown increasingly suspicious of the speculative nature of the metaphysics associated with German idealism. Beginning in the 1930s and continuing well into the 1950s, analytic philosophy, particularly logical positivism, dominated most major philosophy departments in the United States. Analytic philosophers came to view the aims of philosophy as akin to those of the sciences, and thus sought to narrow the range of philosophical inquiry to raise only those questions that could produce verifiable results.

Rats v postrats

Kaufmann considered Nietzsche just the thinker to bring existentialism and analytic philosophy, Europe and America, into dialogue with each other. On the one hand, Nietzsche exhibited the “temper” of existentialism. According to Kaufmann, he blended philosophy and psychology, examined the consequences of the death of God for modern man, and drew from literary sources in his cultural criticism. On the other hand, Nietzsche also exhibited a “positivistic streak” : his rejection of metaphysics, his empiricism, and his attention to the uses of language all demonstrated his affinity with analytic philosophers.57 In pulling these two strains together in Nietzsche, Kaufmann also showed their unexpected harmonies. Despite the antagonisms between them, both sought to dispel illusions masquerading as truth and to question false necessities, and desired “to bring philosophy down to earth.”

Blending biography and reception history, Brinton’s Nietzsche focused on the competing twentieth-century applications of Nietzsche’s philosophy. He surveyed Nietzsche’s reputation and distinguished two op-posing cults: the “gentle” and the “tough” Nietzscheans.

While Kaufmann objected to James’s typology of philosophical personalities, he recognized parallels between Nietzsche’s and James’s shared conviction that a philosopher’s temperament conditions his philosophical views. Nietzsche contended that all philosophy is autobiography, while James argued similarly that a “philosophy is the expression of a man’s intimate character.”

While Kaufmann highlighted significant similarities between Nietzsche and James, he argued that Nietzsche’s experimentalism was a better means than James’s pragmatism for achieving the vibrant chiaroscuro that both thinkers so desperately sought. He characterized James’s pragmatism as a form of utilitarianism that regards a belief as true if it is useful for the person who holds that belief. In his reading of James’s “right to believe,” an idea is true if it helps us to make our way in the world.82 Kaufmann asserted that Nietzsche would have rejected (what Kaufmann once again identified as) the subtle a prioris inherent in James’s thinking. Measuring beliefs in terms of their utility requires that from the outset, we have a presumption of what is useful. If beliefs are deemed true if they meet our needs, then from where do those needs arise in the first place? For Nietzsche, truth can be indifferent to our needs; he argued repeatedly that we should not presume that the world was made for us.

For Nietzsche, neither comfort in the world, nor sheer survival, were the endgames. Both versions of adapting to the environment—whether passively, in a Darwinian sense, or actively, in a Jamesian sense—were equally flawed, for both required that man remain a supplicant to the whims of a dynamic universe indifferent to his existence.

In Kaufmann’s telling, all of Nietzsche’s experiments track back to a vision of true power only achievable through individual autonomy. Nietzschean power, he argued, had nothing to do with brute force or with power over others. The truly powerful individual rejects all forms of political, religious, and ideological affiliation; he refuses to borrow meaning from or to legislate values for others. Power is the standard of one’s values, and these standards can never be confirmed by others. The truly powerful individual does not seek to hurt others; he is indifferent to them.

Kaufmann’s Nietzsche harmonized with the Nietzsche of the emergent anticommunist Right, who shared concerns about the danger of modern man’s conformism. No better do we see this than in the conservative critic and poet Peter Viereck’s The Unadjusted Man (1956), which argued that “Nietzsche will always remain relevant as the first great writer to proclaim unadjustedness as the form heroism takes in a mechanized mass-society.”

it wouldn’t be long before Kaufmann would realize how difficult it was to make Nietzsche a forerunner of existentialism but not an existentialist, a timely thinker who must remain untimely.94 At base, this was a fundamental tension within Kaufmann’s text that he was unable to fully resolve. He clearly hoped his Nietzsche would be palatable to American readers, but not as a literary cocktail to cap off the evening. But that is precisely what began to happen after the book’s publication in 1950.Kaufmann

In his editorial for the first issue of Playboy magazine in December of 1953, which—with a beautiful, buxom Marilyn Monroe on the cover—flew off the shelves and sold almost 54,000 copies, Hefner suggested how men in a period of cultural conservativism and conformity could put the new Nietzsche to work for a little transgressive fun: If you’re a man between the ages of 18 and 80, playboy is meant for you. If you like your entertainment served up with humor, sophistication and spice, playboy will become a very special favorite … a pleasure-primer styled to the masculine taste.… We like our apartment. We enjoy mixing up cocktails and an hors d’oeuvre or two, putting a little mood music on the phonograph and inviting in a female acquaintance for a quiet discussion on Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex.

Another discourse that Kaufmann’s Nietzsche both prepared American readers for and found itself in dialogue with over the course of the 1950s and ’60s was the small but highly visible “Death of God” movement in American theology. Kaufmann later took some credit for the “paradoxical attempt to base a new theology” on his chapter in Nietzsche addressing “The Death of God” and his later Nietzsche translations dealing with relevant themes, but he “took no pride” in his “progeny.”96 His treatment of the death of God emphasized that it was to be understood as “an attempt at a diagnosis of contemporary civilization, not a metaphysical speculation about ultimate reality.”

Within a decade of its initial publication, the “greatest and most persistent problem” of Kaufmann’s Nietzsche became the focal point and rallying cry of a small but visible group of American religious thinkers, who came to be known as “Death of God” theologians. Drawing on the religious existentialism of Paul Tillich, the ethics of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and even the Neo-Orthodoxy of Karl Barth, these liberal theologians sought to examine whether Christian views of the universe were still tenable after the horrors of World War II. Though they came from different Protestant denominations and applied different kinds of analyses, collectively they faced the awful prospect that the notion of God as all-loving, all-powerful, all-knowing could not be reconciled with the monumental suffering of the death camps, or the atomic hell unleashed on the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Nietzsche’s presence in this 1960s discourse is most apparent in the work of Thomas J. J. Altizer, professor of Bible and religion at Emory University and the leading light of death of God theology. Altizer’s “Gospel of Christian Atheism” was no cheeky appeal to antireligionists, but a deeply theological argument about how the death of God is fundamental to the Christian message. Altizer turned to Nietzsche to understand how the birth of Christianity was instantiated in Christ’s death. It was the self-sacrifice of the living God for his people. The death of God was no divine abandonment of his creation, Altizer contended, but the ultimate redemptive act on its behalf. Nietzsche’s claims helped modern Christians understand how God works in the world, how Christianity “entered time and history” and became a “‘world-affirming’ religion” —how death became life.99 “It is precisely the acceptance of Nietzsche’s proclamation of the death of God that is the real test of a contemporary form of faith,” Altizer argued.

One important strain of the death of God theology not mentioned by Time in 1966 was its relevance for Jewish self-understanding after the Holocaust. In that same year, the rabbi and theologian Richard Rubenstein offered his wrenching Nietzschean confession of Jewish faith in his After Auschwitz (1966).Though his exploration is shot through with references to Nietzsche, Rubenstein adopted the moniker “death of God theology” much more reluctantly than his Christian counterparts.

According to Rubenstein, however, Nietzsche’s crucial insight for modern Jews was that he helped them to see something latent in their own faith and history: the Jew as eternal wanderer. Rubenstein not only argued that Auschwitz simply laid bare the terrible vision Nietzsche presented of a world adrift, of a people cut loose from the anchors of faith and scripture as hallmarks of modernity, but also asserted that this was part of the Jews’ diasporic experience, deep in their own history. Furthermore, unlike Christians, Jews had been theological wanderers all along: their messiah never came.

the ineluctable power of this Nietzschean image of Jewish nomadism cut across religious and secular divides and helps explain what Daniel Bell recognized as Nietzsche’s resonance for secular Jewish intellectuals. It is what Bell, in the shattered world of 1946 described in his moving Jewish Frontier essay, “A Parable of Alienation,” which led off with a Nietzsche epigraph: “Woe to him who has no home.” For Bell, Nietzsche helped illustrate the plight of the wandering Jew as a metaphor for the necessary alienation of the modern Jewish intellectual: “The deepest impulses urge us home. But where are we to go?” For Bell as for Rubenstein, Jews could no longer take refuge in ideology, in tradition, or even in Zionism. Nietzsche had shown them that latent in their Judaism, even after the death of God, one remains a Jew, and that radical homelessness was that givenness of being a Jew. Now, after the Holocaust, Bell affirmed, the Jew can only keep on living as he had always had to live: “in permanent tension and as a permanent critic.”106

Jews as rootless cosmopolitan

Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale drafted their Black Panther Party platform and program in 1966, and with it a new vision of how Nietzsche could become a source of power for black self-determination and liberation. In his autobiography, Revolutionary Suicide (1973), Newton cited Nietzsche’s writings on power, Christian morality, and a de-divinized humanity as exerting “a great impact on the development of the Black Panther philosophy.” Nietzsche’s ideas were instrumental, Newton argued, in “raising consciousness” among African Americans about themselves and their America.

he followed Nietzsche’s critique of Christian asceticism and other-worldliness as he explained its degrading effect on African Americans from the time of slavery to the present. Echoing Zarathustra’s plea to forget the fantasies of redemption in a great hereafter and “remain faithful to the earth,” Newton sought “to convince Black people that their rewards were due in the present, that it was in their power to create a Promised Land here and now.” He believed with Nietzsche that the idea of “God” was a damaging historical fiction which reduced man’s sense of power and self-worth: “The more he attributes to God, the more inferior he becomes,” Newton concluded.

For Derrida, following Nietzsche, the hunt for origins had come to an end, because origins are simply that which we ourselves create, and then impute meaning after the fact. We found foundings, we do not find them. Likewise, when we read Nietzsche, as Derrida would do in his analysis of Ecce Homo, we can no longer expect to locate the author, or his intended meanings, in the text. When we do, we enlist a rough-and-ready proper name, “Nietzsche,” to do the work for us. By drawing from Nietzsche’s ideas about language, extending the implications of his “death of God” to the “death of the author,” and showing the utter instability in the simplest acts of reading, Derrida offered a new textualist Nietzsche, who left “traces” of dissimulation in his wake.4 The readings of Nietzsche’s texts, like the readings of the Declaration of Independence, Derrida argued, are never static.

French-inspired, postphenomenological linguistic and cultural theorist who, in all his guises, assaulted the “subject” and “univocal meaning,” and “no longer promise[d] a final aim, goal, or purpose” for interpretation. Now the death of God, long familiar to American readers, would be made unfamiliar with its new application as the death of “traditional logocentric hierarchy,” while the will to power would be transcribed as the will to interpret texts.

Fronting essays by French thinkers Gilles Deleuze, Jean-Francois Lyotard, and Pierre Klossowski along with a few Americans, most notably the composer John Cage, James Leigh’s introduction announced that they had come to “Free Nietzsche” from Kaufmann’s (weakening) grip.

the editor, Daniel T. O’Hara, could now characterize Gallic Heideggerian hermeneutics, Derridean deconstruction, and Foucauldian genealogy of power as the three forms of the “postmodern appropriation of Nietzsche.” Why Nietzsche now in “our supposedly postmodern time?” Because, as these new strains of antifoundationalism show, Nietzsche was the “prophet of an ironic perception of the worthlessness at the heart of culture

Two who employed French readings of Nietzsche to great effect were Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Judith Butler. They drew on a quotation from Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals—a text that had formed the mainstay of American Nietzsche interpretations—but which, thanks to their effort to identify power relations masked as a stable subject, took on new resonance in the 1980s: “There is no ‘being’ behind doing, effecting, becoming; ‘the doer’ is merely a fiction added to the deed—the deed is everything.”21 In Epistemology of the Closet (1992), Sedgwick employed a Nietzschean hermeneutic to challenge compulsory dualisms in human sexuality, in order to examine how notions of desire have been encoded with damaging epistemes, thereby showing how his antiessentialism was essential for queer theory.

as the startling news emanated from the academy that professors were instructing their students that crucial Western conceptions of the moral subject were nothing more than white male apologetics, conservative cultural commentators responded with alarm. The growing thunder on the Right heightened drama around a postmodern Nietzsche, whose ideas challenged the truthfulness of truth. Conservatives regarded his philosophy as an exogenous pathogen infecting young Americans’ hearts and minds. Giving voice to frustrations with the American academy and popular culture of the growing lyrical Right in the 1980s and ’90s, Allan Bloom provided a blistering attack on the “Nietzscheanization” of the academy in The Closing of the American Mind (1987). He articulated a growing grievance among conservatives that it was bad enough to have the spectacle of the counterculture’s constant carnival migrate from the be-ins and student protests of the sixties to the popular culture of the seventies and eighties, but it was worse to have this kind of political theater migrate to the academy. Bloom railed against the “value relativism” he believed left-wing professors were peddling to their students, eager for Nietzsche’s authoritative license of their moral licentiousness.

Bloom’s Closing sought to make clear that while Nietzsche’s antifoundationalism paved the way for modern nihilism, he was also a theorist who—unlike his American progeny—understood its consequences for the human spirit. At the core, the outrage generated over the “Nietzscheanization” of the liberal arts was not just that the academy no longer trained students to adjudicate moral claims, but that it was undermining moral claims altogether, cultivating new generations of Americans with no belief in—or capacity for—intellectual and moral perfectionism.

Fukuyama followed in his mentor’s footsteps, and another American Nietzschean best seller was born. Thus at the height of Nietzsche’s popularity as a French-speaking postmodernist, he got his Nietzsche to speak Greek, and in doing so establish his bona fides as the father of modern American conservatism.

Bloom drew from Nietzsche as a theorist of intellectual belatedness and indebtedness and an exemplar of the poetic burden of the critic. Whether challenging the New Critics’ overspiritualization of criticism and its insistence on the hermetic closure of texts in the 1960s; deconstructionists’ radical despiritualization of criticism and celebration of radical indeterminacy with the “death of the author” in the 1970s; or the move from literary criticism to cultural studies, and with it the politicization of texts by their cultural studies offspring in the 1980s and ’90s, Bloom upbraided the literary critic as knower of truth. In his view, his precursors approached texts as if they could be certain of their meaning, while his contemporaries and their students approach texts with a certainty that there was no meaning whatsoever. But in Bloom’s estimation, both kinds of literary critics are bedeviled by the same problem: they may have questions, but they have no quest. Both seek knowledge, but not wisdom.

Bloom appropriated Nietzsche to distinguish his vision of literary criticism as a form of wisdom literature, as compensation and consolation in a cosmos that is nothing more and nothing less than poetic. He characterized deconstructionists as “negative theologians,” whose nihilism left nothing at stake in literary interpretation, quite literally proving Emerson’s theory of compensation that nothing was got for nothing.

Nietzsche’s own example of tracing the origins—and not just the subsequent genealogy—of bad conscience, his own reckoning with the power of mnemotechnics, where meaning is generated by the hideous pain of memory, went missing altogether in deconstruction: “How … meaning ever gets started … is quite unanswerable upon deconstructive terms.” This was Nietzsche’s great moral and aesthetic contribution, wholly obliterated in what Bloom regarded as the excessive historicism of poststructuralism in particular, where every stance an author makes in a text can be traced “home” to a political, social, or economic context.

While Nietzsche contemplated the primordial poem of mankind, Emerson considered how America might best be conceived as a work of human imagination and creation: “America is a poem in our eyes.”74 Bloom described Emerson as giving voice to the “American swerve,” where “tradition is denied its last particle of authority, and the voice that is great within us rises up” : Life only avails, not the having lived. Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting of an aim.

For Bloom, Emerson’s voice is the voice of American “knowing.” Emerson’s voice did not speak a language of debunking, demystifying, or de-idealizing, but one of circles, ever moving outward from the striving self. Emerson wrote of circles knowing that they have no center. In a world without a center, the only source of authority, of meaning, is the self-begotten self. Emerson showed that this is no easy task, but a heavy “American burden.”77 But Emerson, like Nietzsche, instructed all latecomers that “nothing is got for nothing.”

Though the main figures of this study were Dewey, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein, Rorty enlisted Nietzsche and James as fellow antirepresentationalists, who shared the criticism of the Kantian notion of “‘grounding,’” “culture,” and “knowledge-claims.” Rorty found in all these thinkers allies in his campaign to demonstrate that knowledge is nothing more and nothing less than a “social practice,” and any effort to prove the contrary simply persisted in the illusion that we are discovering when we are really creating, knowing when we are simply putting ideas to work, copying a transcript of the world when we are really just coping with life.

Rorty persistently emphasized the epistemological affinities among Nietzsche, James, and Dewey.91 In doing so, he presented a thoroughly heimatlosen Nietzsche, and thus a cosmopolitan pragmatism, both of which eluded national distinctions between “us” and “them,” “organic” thought and “foreign ideas,” “American” and “Continental” antifoundationalism.

Perhaps Nietzsche’s greatest influence on Rortyian contingency was the implication of his conception of truth for conceptions of the self. Before Nietzsche, philosophers predicated their philosophical investigations on a flawed conception of man. They envisioned “man” —as Nietzsche put it—as an “aeterna veritas,” something that remains constant in the midst of all flux, as a sure measure of things.100 With Nietzsche, Rorty argued, things changed. Nietzsche had insisted that man is not a static being, but rather is constantly in the process of becoming.

Whiteheadian

Nietzsche and the American pragmatists wrote their work in two very different “spirits” : one of social disinterest and even hostility, the other of social hope.

Neither Nietzsche nor Dewey gives us reason to assume that American liberalism cannot go it alone without metaphysics, or an American way of life without foundationalist fictions.

he saw how modern philosophers’ view of themselves and their enterprise can be seen in the “masks” they adopt and the “audience” they believe they are speaking to. For the modern ascetic philosopher, believing he speaks on behalf of truth causes him to adopt the “traditional mask of the Knower; that is, as the only form in which he could carry authority.” But if the modern analytic Knower’s policy is to renounce the moral and aesthetic elements of man’s daily life as unworthy of philosophical examination, who constitutes the “we” of philosophy? Nietzsche’s discussion of “the problem of audience” in The Birth of Tragedy enabled Cavell to push this further: to whom are the ascetic Knower’s truths addressed?

It was Emerson’s recognition, picked up by Nietzsche, that when we think our thinking needs absolutes and elsewheres, we are not yet thinking. For Emerson, the only way to think was to do so, as Cavell put it, “aversive[ly],” pushing against all inheritances as shortcuts to false foundations that will root us in origins and carry us up to God or across the Atlantic to Europe.132 Nietzsche shared this inclination to turn against the “it was” of inherited truths, to reject all predetermined conditions for thought, and to view truths as being created in the process of thinking itself.

Whereas Rorty enlisted Nietzsche to consider the untapped promises of pragmatist antifoundationalism, Bloom and Cavell used him to reconsider Emersonian prophetic antifoundationalism. But all turned to Nietzsche in order to turn back to expressions of antifoundationalism on American native grounds. Whether to emphasize an “American Difference,” as Bloom had done; to “get over” national distinctions in philosophy, as Rorty had done; or to consider that notions of what is “American” and “Continental” are created in the friction of transatlantic engagements, as Cavell had done, all demonstrate powerfully that the “family romance” of antifoundationalism has always extended beyond the nation.

Bloom traced the entrance of Nietzsche’s philosophy to his own German-émigré professors at the University of Chicago, who brought with them Nietzsche’s terrible insights about the bankruptcy of universal, transcendent truth in Western thought and morality. That was all well and good when the academy was committed to teaching students how to work through difficult ideas. But as his philosophy made its way from the academy of the 1940s and 1950s into the radicalized and politicized culture of the 1960s, and from the cloistered seminar to the American marketplace, it became transfigured into a blank check for late twentieth-century American “value relativism.”

Bloom’s Nietzsche was not only the cause of America’s problems but also its best diagnostician. For an author so critical of relativism’s ill effects, Bloom gave little discussion to the virtue of moral absolutes. This is because he lamented not the loss of absolutes as such, but the loss of striving that comes with a belief in absolutes, the belief that truth is possible.

When he asked, wide-eyed, “Why, then, could ideas so contrary to American ideals so easily take root?” he was posing a question that had been raised repeatedly over the century.12 And each time it was raised—whether by liberal Protestant ministers wondering why the pews were thinning out on Sundays, liberal humanists who regarded antifoundationalism as a European problem, or conservative commentators astonished that such an antidemocratic thinker was co-opted by the Left—the questioners were thrown off course by looking for elsewheres rather than into their own interest in Nietzsche. Bloom, like so many others, argued that Nietzsche’s centrality to American thought would not be such a bad thing, if Americans knew their Nietzsche as he did.