American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas

by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen

In addition to the nineteenth-century philistine who mistook dead relics for living law, his seventeenth-century predecessor and corollary to Nietzsche’s “priestly zealot” —the Puritan—seemed to have an insidious effect on American intellectual life. The radicals employed Nietzsche’s description of the “life-inimical” “ascetic priest” as they scoured the past for their forefathers and mothers. Nietzsche described these priests as a self-contradiction: here rules a ressentiment without equal, that of an insatiable instinct and power-will that wants to become master not over something in life but over life itself, over its most profound, powerful, and basic conditions; here an attempt is made to employ force to block up the wells of force; here physiological well-being itself is viewed askance, and especially the outward expression of this well-being, beauty and joy; while pleasure is felt and sought in ill-constitutedness, decay, pain, mischance, ugliness, voluntary deprivation, self-mortification, selfflagellation, self-sacrifice. All this is in the highest degree paradoxical: we stand before a discord that wants to be discordant, that enjoys itself in this suffering and even grows more sel-fconfident and triumphant the more its own presupposition, its physiological capacity for life, decreases. “Triumph in the ultimate agony” : the ascetic ideal has always fought under this hyperbolic sign. Nietzsche’s ascetic priests were “‘too good’ for this world,” and so they sought...