American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas

by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen

In his effort to assimilate Nietzsche’s vision of self-sovereignty into American moral discourse, Royce highlighted the similarities between the Übermensch and the tradition of “ethical Titanism” so central to Western literature and philosophy. As one of the few early twentieth-century American interpreters who observed affinities between Emerson and Nietzsche (though he was unaware of Emerson’s influence on Nietzsche), he argued that Nietzsche’s aphoristic writings revealed his philosophical inclination to overcome the warring instincts within the self—not by suppressing them but by allowing them their full play. Drawing out the romantic strain in Nietzsche’s philosophy, Royce noted, “Like both Emerson and Walt Whitman, Nietzsche feels perfectly free to follow the dialectic of his own mental development, to contradict himself, or, as Walt Whitman said, ‘to contain multitudes.’” He argued that Nietzsche’s Übermensch also shared qualities with Goethe’s Faust and Shelley’s Prometheus in perceiving life as a contest between the autonomous individual and the “world of convention, of tradition, or of destiny.”