American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas

by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen

Moreover, Babbitt asserted that restless moderns’ rejection of a moral center resulted in the modern temper of “self-parody” and inescapable “ennui.” 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. Echoing Nietzsche’s 3 man to seek certainty, Babbitt observed that “the affinity of certain romantic converts for the Church is that of the jelly-fish for the rock.” From Rousseau down to Schlegel, romantics had boomeranged away from and back to ritual and authority, but their return to faith was inevitably colored by this mix of ironic distance and self-mockery. Foreshadowing what over a half century later would emerge as a stock idea of postmodernism, Babbitt argued that the (romantic) Nietzschean celebrated his ironic pose as the most exalted of all temperaments.