American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas

by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen

According to the critics, both Nietzsche and the pragmatists sought to reorient philosophy away from idealism, metaphysics, and Darwinian mate-rialism, and toward a closer analysis of personal experience. Both wanted to abandon the notion of mind as a mirror of nature, because, as they argued, no single observer could neutrally and synoptically apprehend the entirety of human experience. Truth was not a finished fact that lay outside human agency but an instrument developed by people as they interacted with their physical and cultural environments. As William English Walling claimed, Nietzsche, along with James and Dewey, stressed the dynamism of an openended universe and argued that the validity of ideas must be tested through action. “Nietzsche believes that … ‘we can understand only that which we can do’—certainly the very essence of pragmatism,” he wrote.