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...

Neo-Puritanism, Mencken argued, explained the modern American: His enthusiasm was not for repentance, but for what he began to call service. In brief, the national sense of energy and fitness gradually superimposed itself upon the national Puritanism, and from that marriage sprung a keen Wille zur Macht, a lusty will to power. The American Puritan, by now, was not content with the rescue of his own soul; he felt an irresistible impulse to hand salvation on, to disperse and multiply it, to ram it down reluctant throats, to make it free, universal and compulsory. Mencken’s genealogy showed what was possible when American intellectual history was pressed through Nietzsche’s terminology and reassembled by the hands of an angry critic. According to Mencken, the errand into the wilderness had gone terribly awry. From Puritanism to philistinism to a “bellicose” intellectual style that regards its Sklavenmoral as “universal and compulsory” —this was American intellectual history. And it explained its intellectual poverty.

During the war hysteria, as Nietzsche’s philosophy was yoked to German militarism, Bourne used it to critique the “herd instinct” of nationalism at home and imagine a transnational cosmopolitanism that “breathes a larger air.”94 He followed the trends in Nietzsche exegesis, writing acidic reviews of the “denatured Nietzsche” that was emerging in American publications. “It is always a little incongruous to see a great mind expounded by a lesser one,” he blanched, “and nowhere is the incongruity more impressive than in the case of Nietzsche. He is too electric, too poetical, too subtle in his insight, too coruscating in his inconsistencies” for his interpreters.

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.

Speaking for the others, Bourne wrote, “If your ideal is to be adjustment to your situation, in radiant co-operation with reality, then your success is likely to be just that and no more. You never transcend anything. You grow, but your spirit never jumps out of your skin to go on wild adventures.” It was precisely this “thirst for more of the intellectual ‘war and laughter’ that we find Nietzsche calling us to [that] may bring us satisfactions that optimism-haunted philosophies could never bring.”

The letters provide an opportunity, rare for intellectual historians, to enter the moral worlds of general readers and hear their longings, their ideas about ideas, and their concerns about the modern forces undermining American intellectual life.11 Precisely because this mail echoes many of the uses of Nietzsche in published sources, it encourages us to consider how interest in Nietzsche traversed the borders thought to divide American “highbrow” from “middlebrow” and “lowbrow” readers.12 In the letters to the Nietzsche Archive, all the brows are represented.

Though we might be tempted to view the vibrancy of Nietzsche’s posthumous American career as a sign of long-standing, salutary transnational intellectual exchanges and mutuality, many of Nietzsche’s American readers saw just the opposite. They turned to Nietzsche, not because they thought he could make something possible for the pedestrian American intellect, but precisely because, in their view, he couldn’t. A letter from Scheffauer explained how he drew from Nietzsche as he contemplated writing a book called The Spirit of America Today.That spirit, he argued, betrayed “the old, noble, when also narrow Puritanism I admire so much, even if it was philistine and hostile to art. But it brought forth beautiful and exalted types. Alas, the types of today! Absolute degeneration and wildness—a wild hedonism, mechanization, herd morality. If only your eternal brother were here to give his verdict over today’s America.”61 Similarly, Gottfried Betz of Columbia University used his letters to Förster-Nietzsche to reflect on the differences between German and American intellectual and cultural life: “Our wealth is inconceivable. We can buy the whole world, but no intellectual treasures. Their value is at the lowest level in America. What can you do with character [Gemüt], beauty, and a finely-educated mind? … Business and the stupidest, mindless recreations fill the life of the American.… Whoever confesses other ideals is an exception.”62 That Nietzsche’s philosophy could shrink the d...

Given the popular press’s image of Zarathustra as the Ur-text of European totalitarianism, and the academy’s general disregard for him, it was hard to imagine that Nietzsche’s philosophy had much of a future in American intellectual life. Commentators in the United States sympathetic to Nietzsche worked hard to redeem his damaged reputation after World War I. After his being linked to a second world war, however, few were willing to try it again. But one Harvard graduate student in philosophy stepped forward: Walter Kaufmann. Much as we may prefer to believe that ideas spread because of their essential worth or their inherent aptness at a particular historical moment, the case of Nietzsche in postwar America shows how one relatively obscure scholar can usher in a momentous shift in intellectual styles and concerns.

For the last half century, English-speaking readers of Nietzsche have been, first and foremost, readers of Kaufmann’s Nietzsche. However, it was also his Nietzsche that paved the way for the renewed interest in translations of the German philosopher’s works and provided readers with an interpretive context for them. In the words of one prominent Nietzsche scholar, Tracy Strong, the “power of Kaufmann’s [book on and translations of Nietzsche] effectively gave him … control over Nietzsche studies in America.… His was the only opinion that would always be sought.” At least up until his death in 1980,“Kaufmann’s Nietzsche was the Nietzsche for American and British studies.”

Because he came as a nineteen-year old student while the intellectuals typically considered part of this transfer were adults and in many cases had well-established careers, it is easy to see why his story does not fold easily into collective biographies of German intellectual exiles in the United States. But like the others, Kaufmann was an intellectual exile who, as an aspiring rabbi, had no choice but to flee. In addition, like many of the other émigrés, he eventually established himself as a prominent scholar and a major force in American intellectual life. Also like the others, Nietzsche was a central figure in his intellectual coming of age and in the ongoing development of his thought. He shared their interest in Nietzsche’s effort to unmoor moral foundations, their firsthand experience of the Nazism that worshipped Nietzsche, and their broad agreement that Nietzsche was no proto-Nazi.

Once he highlighted Förster-Nietzsche’s anti-Semitism, Kaufmann built his case for Nietzsche’s innocence by emphasizing the philosopher’s “powerful ambivalence” about his little sister. He loved her because of her devotion to him, but he was often aggrieved by all the ways she “embodied the nar-rowness … and the deeply unchristian Christianity” of the warped culture of the Kaiserreich.34 Ambivalence escalated to disgust when he learned of her marriage to Förster. Witness, for example, his letter to her in 1887 in which he wrote,“One of the greatest stupidities you have committed—for yourself and for me! Your association with an anti-Semitic chief expresses a foreignness to my whole way of life which fills me ever again with ire or melancholy.” To this Kaufmann added Nietzsche’s hatred of “Anti-Semitic Teutonism,” which played a central role in his break from Wagner, and loaded his text with selections from Nietzsche’s published writings and personal letters that showed his disdain for anti-Semitism as another expression of nineteenth-century German ignorance and chauvinism. Kaufmann quoted Nietzsche’s last letter to his friend Franz Overbeck: “Just now I am having all anti-Semites shot.”

In Dialectic, Adorno and Horkheimer drew heavily on Nietzsche’s critique of the Enlightenment to challenge the conventional view of its legacies as progress. The Enlightenment’s unwarranted esteem for human rationality, they argued, did not simply lead to the “disenchantment of the world” —it sowed the seeds of its own destruction. By exalting the limitless power of instrumental rationality, the Enlightenment cultivated an ideology in which nothing lay beyond the power of human apprehension, domination, and administration. The “administered world” of Nazism, then, represented the realization, not the abandonment, of the Enlightenment: the “Enlightenment is totalitarian.” According to Adorno and Horkheimer, though Nietzsche would not have known the modern coinage totalitarian, he clearly “recognized the dialectic of enlightenment” animating its worldview. Much to their horror, what Nietz-sche had attacked as Enlightenment violence masked as order, and sadism as compassion, was not limited to European fascism but also could be found in what they termed the American “culture industry.” Writing just a few miles outside Hollywood, they claimed that in advanced industrial capitalism, culture became a commodity that aimed to entertain, not elevate, and in doing so, purposefully dulled modern man’s consciousness of himself and blinded him to the gross inequities around him.

Certainly, so idiosyncratic a thinker as Adorno cannot be made representative of all the other émigrés. But the extremity with which his negativist Nietzsche registered their psychic dislocations, their loss, their anguish, and their fury with a world turned upside down poses a crucial backdrop for understanding why Kaufmann’s Nietzsche made the easy headway into midcentury American culture that it did. As we shall see, in almost every respect Kaufmann’s Nietzsche is a counter-Nietzsche to Adorno’s. Adorno’s negativist Nietzsche was forced from a settled life and clear career path in Germany. Kaufmann’s Nietzsche was formulated while a student in America. Adorno’s Nietzsche relentlessly criticized the Enlightenment. Kaufmann’s Nietzsche exemplified its unrealized promises. Adorno’s Nietzsche thought the ra tional self parroted instrumental virtues. Kaufmann’s Nietzsche considered the rational self the seat of all morality.

Throughout his study, Kaufmann sought to make clear his agenda to reverse all trends in Nietzsche interpretation on both sides of the Atlantic, which cast him as either a Darwinist, a romantic, or a “wayward disciple” of Schopenhauer. Most of all, he wanted to establish Nietzsche as a serious philosopher. Kaufmann insisted that it was high time that Nietzsche be afforded his rightful “place in the grand tradition of Western thought.” In order to demonstrate that Nietzsche was “a major historical event” in the Western tradition, Kaufmann argued that it was necessary to put him in dialogue with the appropriate interlocutors: Socrates, Plato, Luther, Kant, Hegel, and Goethe. In fact, Kaufmann maintained that Nietzsche was best understood as an Enlightenment figure. Similar to Kant’s “motto” for the Enlightenment, “Have the courage to avail yourself of your own understanding” (Sapere aude!), Nietzsche defined his philosophical quest as the pursuit of intellectual self-sovereignty. “‘One thing is needed ’—namely,‘that a human being attain satisfaction with himself,’ recreate himself, and become a ‘single one’ by giving style to his character.”

Kaufmann warned his readers that “Nietzsche’s books are easier to read but harder to understand than those of almost any other thinker.” But he insisted that Nietz-sche was more than a great stylist. In fact, Nietzsche admonished writers who let style trump substance. He criticized what he called “literary decadence,” where meaning resides in flashes of insight but not in the text as a whole. If the dots do not connect, then all we have got—as Nietzsche put it—is an “anarchy of atoms.”48 Indeed, critics had long charged that Nietzsche wrote in aphorisms because he could not think straight. Throughout the first half of the century, they recognized his literary skill and his searing intellect, but they insisted that aphorism was unfit for serious philosophy.

American reviewers enthusiastically greeted Kaufmann’s effort to establish Nietzsche as a philosopher worthy of serious examination. In scholarly journals and the popular press, commentators described Kaufmann’s study as a “revelation,” “one of those rare works that no student of modern thought can afford to ignore,” and “one of the best expositions of Nietzsche’s philosophy,” noting that one of his greatest achievements was that he made Nietzsche make sense.54 Positive as the initial reviews had been, Kaufmann likely suspected that it would be difficult to persuade academic philosophers of Nietzsche’s value. At midcentury, the rift that had been growing since the late nineteenth century between Anglo-American and Continental thought was as wide as ever.

As Kaufmann later expressed his zeal for Nietzsche’s redemptive possibilities for midcentury philosophy in his introduction to The Portable Nietzsche (1954), “Nietzsche is the … best bridge between positivism and existentialism.” With “German and Romance philosophy and Anglo-American ‘analysis’ … completely out of touch with each other,” Kaufmann argued that Nietzsche could help reestablish “some bond between what are now two completely divergent branches of modern thought.” He did not miss the irony that “Nietzsche, once stupidly denounced as the mind that caused the First World War, might well become a major aid to international understanding.”

Over the course of the 1930s, American readers confronted articles drawing connections between “Nietzsche and the Crisis,” announc-ing that “Nietzsche Held Nazis’ Prophet in War on Christ,” and warning that developments in Europe were proving Nietzscheism to be the most “serious enemy” of modern Christianity.60 “I Married a Nazi!” reported an American woman, whose once-happy marriage to a German was now destroyed by his Nietzschean hatred for all things Christian and democratic, while “Pagan Customs Revived for Nazi Weddings” quoted the passages from Zarathustra mandated as part of the neopagan Nazi wedding ceremonies.61 In 1943, New York Times readers learned that Hitler had sent Mussolini a specially bound edition of the complete works of Nietzsche for his sixtieth birthday.

Though Kaufmann would have had his work cut out for him simply taking on the Nietzsche image in the popular press, it was the 1941 authoritative study of the philosopher’s life and thought by Harvard intellectual historian (and later American Historical Association president) Crane Brinton that demanded the fullest response. Throughout the 1940s, Brinton’s book, which argued that Nietzsche’s philosophy was the inspiration for Nazism, emerged as the authoritative interpretation of Nietzsche. Thus, in order to challenge the claim that Nietzsche was a forerunner of the Nazis, Kaufmann had to take on Brinton.

The confession by Crane Brinton in his assessment of Kaufmann’s book for the Saturday Review of Literature in 1951 is even more startling. He began by poking fun at the flawed US scholarship on Nietzsche’s ideas and conceded that his was no better: “I myself … brought out a brief [it was 266 pages] and, I admit, rather ill-tempered analysis of Nietzsche in which I found some of his ideas congruous with those of the Nazis, and Nietzsche himself a somewhat unpleasantly pathetic intellectual.” Throughout his study, Kaufmann consistently took issue with Brinton’s interpretations, and Brinton, in turn, used his book review as a platform to tone down or qualify his claims from a decade earlier. He praised the “compact richness of [Kaufmann’s] book,” noting the subtlety with which Kaufmann synthesized Nietzsche’s ideas while “avoid[ing] the tendency to put Nietzsche back together too neatly.” By granting that Kaufmann made “the best case for” a revisionist interpretation of Nietzsche’s martial claims, Brinton seemed willing to question his own version of the philosopher as a demented and decadent proto-Nazi. He noted approvingly that Kaufmann’s study was “one of the very best books on Nietzsche I have seen.”

But Kaufmann easily dismissed Brinton’s categorization of “gentle” and “tough” Nietzsche interpreters, arguing that it failed to capture the subtlety of Nietzsche’s philosophy, or even to account for the taxonomy of the varieties of “Nietzschean” interpretation. First, he insisted that the term Nietzschean made no sense. Nietzsche repeatedly scorned anyone who would follow another master. As he himself put it, “One repays a teacher badly if one always remains a pupil only.” Nietzsche’s philosophy repudiated the very idea of intellectual discipleship: “A ‘Nietzschean’ … whether ‘gentle’ or ‘tough,’ is in a sense a contradiction in terms: to be a Nietzschean, one must not be a Nietzschean.”

For Nietzsche, even a belief that is necessary for life may be false: just because one cannot bear the idea that God does not exist does not give God the right to exist.83 Kaufmann, likewise, contended that Nietzsche differed from the pragmatists, for even though he too held that “the intellect is an instrument, its figments should be frankly labeled as fictions.” Indeed for Nietzsche, “‘appearance, error, deception, dissimulation, delusion, self-delusion’ all aid life; life ‘has always shown itself to be on the side of the most unscrupulous polytropoi.’”84 In this regard, Kaufmann deemed Nietzsche a truer pluralist than James, for he widened the field for experience.

For Nietzsche, neither comfort in the world, nor sheer survival, were the endgames. Both versions of adapting to the environment—whether passively, in a Darwinian sense, or actively, in a Jamesian sense—were equally flawed, for both required that man remain a supplicant to the whims of a dynamic universe indifferent to his existence. Nietzsche maintained that creating meaning should never be a collaborative project. In a world without any universal confirmation of human values, the higher man alone must become his own legislator of values. According to Kaufmann’s Nietzsche, sickness and health, pain and joy, truth and fiction are the raw materials for the higher man to harness in his quest for self-mastery. Power, not survival, is the measure of man. And true power is the ability to employ, not just overcome, pain.

In Kaufmann’s telling, all of Nietzsche’s experiments track back to a vision of true power only achievable through individual autonomy. Nietzschean power, he argued, had nothing to do with brute force or with power over others. The truly powerful individual rejects all forms of political, religious, and ideological affiliation; he refuses to borrow meaning from or to legislate values for others. Power is the standard of one’s values, and these standards can never be confirmed by others. The truly powerful individual does not seek to hurt others; he is indifferent to them. “Only the weak need to convince themselves and others of their might by inflicting hurt: the truly powerful are not concerned with others but act out of a fullness and an overflow.” This fullness, Kaufmann argued, is achieved not by overcoming others but rather by the “will to overcome one-self.”

“Nietzsche will always remain relevant as the first great writer to proclaim unadjustedness as the form heroism takes in a mechanized mass-society.” Viereck used a very Kaufmann-esque Nietzsche to diagnose the characterological deficits of midcentury Americans, to exhort them to “preserve the inner life” and to appreciate that liberty is fundamentally achieved as an “inner psychological liberty.”89 This Nietzsche—the cultural physician of the inner life—who understands the importance of the human cultural grounds of freedom, moved easily from the anti-Stalinist Right to the anti-Stalinist Left, and informed the criticism of Lionel Trilling. In 1950, Trilling presented a Nietzsche who helped him articulate his own exhaustion with collectivist ideologies and his cautious rapprochement with American culture, and identified the “liberal imagination” —what Nietzsche helped him to see as “life’s continuous evaluation of itself ” —as the only preserve of genuine freedom.

In his editorial for the first issue of Playboy magazine in December of 1953, which—with a beautiful, buxom Marilyn Monroe on the cover—flew off the shelves and sold almost 54,000 copies, Hefner suggested how men in a period of cultural conservativism and conformity could put the new Nietzsche to work for a little transgressive fun: If you’re a man between the ages of 18 and 80, playboy is meant for you. If you like your entertainment served up with humor, sophistication and spice, playboy will become a very special favorite … a pleasure-primer styled to the masculine taste.… We like our apartment. We enjoy mixing up cocktails and an hors d’oeuvre or two, putting a little mood music on the phonograph and inviting in a female acquaintance for a quiet discussion on Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex.95 Kaufmann had tried to present a Nietzsche, like Zarathustra, for everyone and no one: accessible, but not ready-made; coherent, but not convenient. But the quick success of his Nietzsche might have suggested to him how difficult that would be. He wanted Nietzsche to be a problem thinker, but the problem of how bored white-collar men could spice up their sex lives was likely not what he had in mind.

If these liberal theologians understood the death of God as an event in human history, their overnight notoriety in 1966 showed how it was also a media event in American popular culture. For it was the April 8, 1966, cover of Time magazine, which boldly asked,“Is God Dead?” that catapulted death of God theology into the limelight. Never before in Time’s forty-three-year history had the editors run a cover without an illustration or photograph. However, in their search for a work of art “suggesting a contemporary idea of God,” they came up empty-handed.101 It turned out that the three words—“Is God Dead?” in bright red letters set against a stark black background—said it all.

The effectiveness of Kaufmann’s effort to bring Nietzsche to American audiences can be seen in the sheer range of the counter-Enlightenments it ushered in. No better do we see this than in the journey of Kaufmann’s Nietzsche from an anti-ideological, apolitical thinker to a revolutionary for social justice.

Frustrated with what they regarded as the slow and uneven progress of the nonviolent civil rights movement, Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale drafted their Black Panther Party platform and program in 1966, and with it a new vision of how Nietzsche could become a source of power for black self-determination and liberation. In his autobiography, Revolutionary Suicide (1973), Newton cited Nietzsche’s writings on power, Christian morality, and a de-divinized humanity as exerting “a great impact on the development of the Black Panther philosophy.”

In his effort to reformulate Nietzsche’s will to power as the strength for self-sovereignty, Kaufmann argued that it was not the basis of a political program. He insisted that “Nietzsche begs his readers to keep in mind that he does not write to endorse a course of action. His [philosophy] wants to stimulate thought,‘nothing else’ … it is meant for people ‘to whom thinking is a delight, nothing else.’” Kaufmann’s Nietzsche embodied the philosopher of the vita contemplativa, for whom contemplation was itself a vital, life-affirming activity.

But as the “death of God” of the 1960s gave way to the “death of the author” movement of the 1970s and ’80s, Rorty found himself engaged with Nietzschean interlocutors very different from Kaufmann—French theorists like Jacques Derrida—who had grave doubts about even the possibilities for conversation. Rorty too would come to argue that conversation—and contributing to the proliferation of languages with which to conduct it—was philosophy’s signal contribution. And though neither he nor the decon-structionist and poststructuralist Nietzsches with whom he conversed prized agreement or even thought it possible, they could agree on one thing: the days of the “unmistakable,” “unequivocal,” enlightened Dionysian Nietzsche were over. And so too the possibilities of a Nietzschean center that holds.