American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas

by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen

Thus, the real struggle of the heroic individual is not solely to liberate himself from conflict with society, but rather to use the conflict within himself as a source for self-regeneration.

he stressed that the meanings of life that “make any genuine vital difference on a large scale, to the lives of our descendants,” are not in one’s private ideals or in the rote acceptance of others’ but in “the marriage, namely, of some unhabitual ideal, however special, with some fidelity, courage, and endurance; with some man’s or woman’s pains.”

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.

For Nietzsche, as for Royce, creating values and meaning without foundations required that “you shall get control over your For and Against and learn how to display [them] in accordance with your higher goal. You shall learn to grasp the sense of perspective in every value judgement.”

Nietzsche’s philosophy served as a key contributor to the modern rejection of metaphysical, moral, and rational foundations as the basis for human knowledge and conduct,

He accepted Nietzsche’s argument that those who would try to live without a clear moral vision and higher ideals would be left with a persistent longing and nostalgia for the psychological security of fixed belief, as well as a newfound irony that mocks their own desire for such comfort.

Whereas the Greeks understood that man “should think lightly of himself but should have some conviction for which he is ready to die,” the “romantic ironist” is “morbidly sensitive about himself, but is ready to mock at his own convictions.”

Santayana identified himself “as an outsider” who had “chafed for years under the pressure of a prim, academic idealism,” a subjective “egotism,” which he believed derived from German intellectual history and had thoroughly saturated American thought and culture.

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.”

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.

Nietzsche was “essentially… a religious man” without a religion, a searching pilgrim whose “scientific conscience forbade him” to believe in God, but not in the potential grandeur of humankind.

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.

“It is well known that there is not a single critical position adopted by British, American, and Canadian scholars which did not emanate from Germany.”

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.

we feel the tug towards freedom as the strongest drive of our spirit and, in antithesis to the fettered and firm-rooted intellects, see our ideal almost in an intellectual nomadism.

The ruins of a toppled past, they learned from Nietzsche, were breeding grounds for despair but no refuge for the modern free spirit.

Harrison discovered in Nietzsche a model of the freelance, freethinking, autonomous intellectual he aspired to become.

Representative Men was a confession that the culture of American democracy may never pull this off. None of his examples of genius in “American Scholar” are American. After thirteen years in ardent pursuit of the native intellect, he came up empty-handed: none of those whom he classified as great men in history were American either.

Nietzsche’s example taught his young American counterparts that even if they were toiling silently in the dark recesses of anonymous cities, with shoulders a little sore, eyes a little strained, and paychecks a little unforthcoming, their labors had a purpose.

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.

In his own quest for a progressive politics befitting the critics’ democratic aspirations, he argued that dogma must be replaced by inquiry, assertions by experiment.

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.

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.

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.

he expressed his anxiety of belatedness to a world already fixed into immutable form. “Everything about you is given, ready, constituted, rigid, set up when you arrive. You always think that some day you are going to catch up to this givenness, that you will dominate instead of falling in line.”

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.

According to Lippmann, “The rock of ages … has been blasted for us” :“We have lost authority. We are ‘emancipated’ from an ordered world. We drift.”111 Although they jubilantly challenged the church’s authority, laissez-faire capitalism, liberal political theory, Victorian decorum, and Puritan psychology, the radicals were equally concerned, indeed anxious, about the consequences of toppled truths.

There are passages in their writings that read like devotional literature. When Margaret Anderson called Nietzsche the radicals’ “prophet” or Agnes Boulton described Zarathustra as Eugene O’Neill’s “sacred book,” it might suggest that the radicals couldn’t live in a world after God, so they turned Nietzsche into one.

Thus, their Nietzsche—the personalist, the secular savior, and the cultural critic—taught them about the role of the philosopher and the possibilities of philosophy in modern American life.

inspired the belief that human greatness was still possible in the modern world. Though unworthy of his greatness, he nevertheless awakened in her a longing for something deeper in herself.

Kaufmann enrolled at Williams College, and after only two years graduated with honors in philosophy and religion. Though intensely interested in his religious studies, as the war broke out he had what he later described as a “mystical experience” : “In the most intense despair I suddenly saw that I had deceived myself for years: I had believed. At last the God of tradition joined the Holy Ghost and Christ.”

Over the following years, an estimated half million intellectuals were purged by the Nazis; more than a third of them took refuge in the United States, and roughly two-thirds of them were Jewish.

The notion that the universe is guided by providential design or natural law of progress was forever bankrupt: “All this is now past because it has conscience against it.”

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.”

'the Enlightenment is totalitarian' eek

what Nietz-sche had attacked as Enlightenment violence masked as order, and sadism as compassion, was not limited to European fascism but also could be found in what they termed the American “culture industry.” Writing just a few miles outside Hollywood, they claimed that in advanced industrial capitalism, culture became a commodity that aimed to entertain, not elevate, and in doing so, purposefully dulled modern man’s consciousness of himself and blinded him to the gross inequities around him.

Similar to Kant’s “motto” for the Enlightenment, “Have the courage to avail yourself of your own understanding” (Sapere aude!), Nietzsche defined his philosophical quest as the pursuit of intellectual self-sovereignty. “‘One thing is needed ’—namely,‘that a human being attain satisfaction with himself,’ recreate himself, and become a ‘single one’ by giving style to his character.”

a passionate quest for knowledge, an unceasing series of courageous experiments—small experiments, lacking in glamour and apparent grandeur, yet so serious that we cannot dodge them.”

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.

a conviction that one can distinguish cause from effect. According to Nietzsche, belief in causation was simply a metaphysical hangover of a worn-out belief in objectivity.

“A critic may marvel how ‘pluralism’ is abandoned so suddenly and how radically unempirical is the claim that there are only two philosophies to choose from:

Quoting Zarathustra, he noted,“One herd: each wants the same, each is the same—and whoever feels different goes voluntarily into an asylum.”

“Instead of relying on heavenly powers to redeem him, to give meaning to his life, and to justify the world,” the self-sovereign individual “gives meaning to his own life by achieving [a] perfection” authored andrealized by him alone.87

“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,”

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.

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.

Emerson understood that readers can turn to works of the intellect and imagination not in the hope of instruction but for provocation, and to read them so that they may be read.