American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas

by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen

James gravitated toward the image of the Übermensch, but it nevertheless carried with it disturbing associations of the philosopher whose temperament gave it form. Nary a reference to Nietzsche crops up in James’s (at least) ten-year contact with his ideas that does not invoke his sickness. Such references are at their most colorful and generous in Varieties, where James described “the mood” of Nietzsche (and Schopenhauer) as marked by “an ennobling sadness,” but also by a “peevishness running away with the bit between its teeth.” Their “sallies … remind one, half the time, of the sick shriekings of two dying rats.”47 Nevertheless, James expressed his sympathy for Nietzsche’s unsympathetic attack on asceticism as a moral ideal. And, though halting and uncertain, his descriptions of an Übermensch—the immoderate striver, who can plant a foot in an antifoundational universe where there is no certain hold—indicate the resonance of this image of a higher humanity for him.