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American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas
If you were looking for a philosopher likely to appeal to Americans, Friedrich Nietzsche would be far from your first choice. After all, in his blazing career, Nietzsche took aim at nearly all the foundations of modern American life: Christian morality, the Enlightenment faith in reason, and the idea of human equality. Despite that, for more than a century Nietzsche has been a hugely popular—and surprisingly influential—figure in American thought and culture.
In American Nietzsche, Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen delves deeply into Nietzsche's philosophy, and America’s reception of it, to tell the story of his curious appeal. Beginning her account with Ralph Waldo Emerson, whom the seventeen-year-old Nietzsche read fervently, she shows how Nietzsche’s ideas first burst on American shores at the turn of the twentieth century, and how they continued alternately to invigorate and to shock Americans for the century to come. She also delineates the broader intellectual and cultural contexts within which a wide array of commentators—academic and armchair philosophers, theologians and atheists, romantic poets and hard-nosed empiricists, and political ideologues and apostates from the Left and the Right—drew insight and inspiration from Nietzsche’s claims for the death of God, his challenge to universal truth, and his insistence on the interpretive nature of all human thought and beliefs. At the same time, she explores how his image as an iconoclastic immoralist was put to work in American popular culture, making Nietzsche an unlikely posthumous celebrity capable of inspiring both teenagers and scholars alike.
A penetrating examination of a powerful but little-explored undercurrent of twentieth-century American thought and culture, American Nietzsche dramatically recasts our understanding of American intellectual life—and puts Nietzsche squarely at its heart.
In American Nietzsche, Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen delves deeply into Nietzsche's philosophy, and America’s reception of it, to tell the story of his curious appeal. Beginning her account with Ralph Waldo Emerson, whom the seventeen-year-old Nietzsche read fervently, she shows how Nietzsche’s ideas first burst on American shores at the turn of the twentieth century, and how they continued alternately to invigorate and to shock Americans for the century to come. She also delineates the broader intellectual and cultural contexts within which a wide array of commentators—academic and armchair philosophers, theologians and atheists, romantic poets and hard-nosed empiricists, and political ideologues and apostates from the Left and the Right—drew insight and inspiration from Nietzsche’s claims for the death of God, his challenge to universal truth, and his insistence on the interpretive nature of all human thought and beliefs. At the same time, she explores how his image as an iconoclastic immoralist was put to work in American popular culture, making Nietzsche an unlikely posthumous celebrity capable of inspiring both teenagers and scholars alike.
A penetrating examination of a powerful but little-explored undercurrent of twentieth-century American thought and culture, American Nietzsche dramatically recasts our understanding of American intellectual life—and puts Nietzsche squarely at its heart.
464 pages, Hardcover
First published October 28, 2011
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March 31, 2023
Nietzsche In The United States
Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen's book, "American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and his Ideas" (2011) examines the reception of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 - 1900) in the United States and Americans' ongoing and continued fascination with his writings and character. Ratner-Rosenhagen, the Merle Curti Associate Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin -- Madison, also discusses the influence of American thought on Nietzsche. In particular the book comes full circle by beginning and ending with the thought of Ralph Waldo Emerson. As a student, Nietzsche became enamored with Emerson, read his works assiduously for many years, and made extensive marginal notes on his books, which he read in German translation. Scholars over the years have recognized Emerson's influence on Nietzsche, but Ratner-Rosenhagen explores their similarities in detail. The study also ends with Nietzsche and Emerson, as Ratner-Rosenhagen discusses their related conception of philosophy and its purpose. Both thinkers see philosophy as non-foundational and without absolutes or certainties. Both Emerson and Nietzsche tend to deny that philosophy is a study with a separate subject matter or "fach". Rather it is a search to find meaning in a world of risk, uncertainty, and lack of transcendental mooring. For Ratner-Rosenhagen and for the subjects of her study, philosophy is meant to be a provocation to thought rather than a doctrine.
The scholarship and learning of this book are prodigious as Ratner-Rosenhagen discusses the engagement of many important American thinkers with Nietzsche. I was pleased with her detailed discussion of the American idealist philosopher Josiah Royce and his understanding of Nietzsche's importance. Most of the thinkers she discusses, however, are not in the idealist category. They include, among the early pragmatists, William James, John Dewey. Mid-twentieth century thinkers include Walter Kaufmann whose translations of Nietzsche and particular understanding of this thinker made Nietzsche available to a generation of readers. Ratner-Rosenhagen studies how French deconstructionists and their American followers read Nietzsche in a manner highly different from Kaufmann's synthesis. She also considers later thinkers including Alan Bloom, the influential literary critic Harold Bloom, together with Richard Rorty and Stanley Cavell.
Ratner-Rosenhagen shows that Nietzsche's influence extended far beyond these major American intellectual figures and into what is often described as "middle-brow" or "low-brow" American culture. She offers substantial discussion of how Protestant and Catholic clergy engaged with Nietzsche, both to find what they found valuable in his thought and what they tried to reject. She discusses the iconoclastic H.L. Menken and his extended writings on Nietzsche. There are considerations of early doctoral dissertations in the United States and of considerations of his philosophy by thinkers who have been largely forgotten. And interestingly, a chapter of the book deals with "fan letters" that American readers of Nietzsche sent to the Nietzsche Archives which was under the control of the philosopher's sister, Elizabeth Forster Nietzsche. The book is heavily documented with lengthy substantive endnotes which are important to the text.
As with most great philosophers, Nietzsche's thought is difficult. His beautiful literary style and his aphoristic writing if anything complicate understanding. In addition, Ratner-Rosenhagen explores Nietzsche's American reception in the context of thinkers who are themselves difficult. The reader must both engage with Nietzsche and with American 20th Century intellectual history in reading this book. Ratner-Rosenhagen's exposition of some of the thinkers she discusses, particularly the deconstructionists, is not as helpful as it might be to the uninitiated reader. The book demands slow, thoughtful consideration.
Readers coming to this book will probably have a familiarity and a strong passion for Nietzsche. Ratner-Rosenhagen understandably avoids the temptation to present a full exposition of his thought. Her book explores what American readers have made of him. She discusses key aspects of Nietzsche, including his anti-foundationalism (perspectivism), his famous claim that "God is dead", his emphasis on interpretation, and the role of the "overman" in his thought. There are interpretive questions, addressed by different readers, about whether Nietzsche is a "political" or a "personal" thinker and about what Americans of varied political persuasions have found worthwhile in this markedly undemocratic philosopher. The approach of the book tends to be historicist. Ratner-Rosenhagen tries to show how different American interpretations of Nietzsche surfaced in response to changes in American culture.
The book begins with a brief consideration of Nietszsche himself and of Emerson's influence. The book proceeds largely chronologically with Nietzsche's early American reception and the first translations of his books. Subsequent early chapters discuss religious responses to Nietzsche, the struggle of American thinkers to understand the "ubermensch" and Nietszsche's role as an educator. Following an "interlude" in which Ratner-Rosenhagen examines the reaction to Nietzsche by many ordinary Americans, the book resumes with Walter Kaufmann, existentialism, and then late 20th Century readings of Nietzsche, returning at the end to the American philosopher, Emerson.
The most recurring philosophical idea in this book is anti-foundationalism, a position the author appears to share enthusiastically with Nietzsche and Emerson. There remains strong philosophical thinking in the United States that cannot be characterized as "anti-foundational" including, the thought of Royce and Alan Bloom, among the thinkers she discusses, as well as many others of varying persuasions. Perhaps the author takes anti-foundationalism too much for granted.
This book is an extraordinary study. It reawakened me to think again about Nietzsche in the company of the American pragmatists I have been reading for some years. The book will be of great value to readers with a serious interest in Nietzsche, American culture, American thought, and the play of the mind.
Robin Friedman
Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen's book, "American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and his Ideas" (2011) examines the reception of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 - 1900) in the United States and Americans' ongoing and continued fascination with his writings and character. Ratner-Rosenhagen, the Merle Curti Associate Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin -- Madison, also discusses the influence of American thought on Nietzsche. In particular the book comes full circle by beginning and ending with the thought of Ralph Waldo Emerson. As a student, Nietzsche became enamored with Emerson, read his works assiduously for many years, and made extensive marginal notes on his books, which he read in German translation. Scholars over the years have recognized Emerson's influence on Nietzsche, but Ratner-Rosenhagen explores their similarities in detail. The study also ends with Nietzsche and Emerson, as Ratner-Rosenhagen discusses their related conception of philosophy and its purpose. Both thinkers see philosophy as non-foundational and without absolutes or certainties. Both Emerson and Nietzsche tend to deny that philosophy is a study with a separate subject matter or "fach". Rather it is a search to find meaning in a world of risk, uncertainty, and lack of transcendental mooring. For Ratner-Rosenhagen and for the subjects of her study, philosophy is meant to be a provocation to thought rather than a doctrine.
The scholarship and learning of this book are prodigious as Ratner-Rosenhagen discusses the engagement of many important American thinkers with Nietzsche. I was pleased with her detailed discussion of the American idealist philosopher Josiah Royce and his understanding of Nietzsche's importance. Most of the thinkers she discusses, however, are not in the idealist category. They include, among the early pragmatists, William James, John Dewey. Mid-twentieth century thinkers include Walter Kaufmann whose translations of Nietzsche and particular understanding of this thinker made Nietzsche available to a generation of readers. Ratner-Rosenhagen studies how French deconstructionists and their American followers read Nietzsche in a manner highly different from Kaufmann's synthesis. She also considers later thinkers including Alan Bloom, the influential literary critic Harold Bloom, together with Richard Rorty and Stanley Cavell.
Ratner-Rosenhagen shows that Nietzsche's influence extended far beyond these major American intellectual figures and into what is often described as "middle-brow" or "low-brow" American culture. She offers substantial discussion of how Protestant and Catholic clergy engaged with Nietzsche, both to find what they found valuable in his thought and what they tried to reject. She discusses the iconoclastic H.L. Menken and his extended writings on Nietzsche. There are considerations of early doctoral dissertations in the United States and of considerations of his philosophy by thinkers who have been largely forgotten. And interestingly, a chapter of the book deals with "fan letters" that American readers of Nietzsche sent to the Nietzsche Archives which was under the control of the philosopher's sister, Elizabeth Forster Nietzsche. The book is heavily documented with lengthy substantive endnotes which are important to the text.
As with most great philosophers, Nietzsche's thought is difficult. His beautiful literary style and his aphoristic writing if anything complicate understanding. In addition, Ratner-Rosenhagen explores Nietzsche's American reception in the context of thinkers who are themselves difficult. The reader must both engage with Nietzsche and with American 20th Century intellectual history in reading this book. Ratner-Rosenhagen's exposition of some of the thinkers she discusses, particularly the deconstructionists, is not as helpful as it might be to the uninitiated reader. The book demands slow, thoughtful consideration.
Readers coming to this book will probably have a familiarity and a strong passion for Nietzsche. Ratner-Rosenhagen understandably avoids the temptation to present a full exposition of his thought. Her book explores what American readers have made of him. She discusses key aspects of Nietzsche, including his anti-foundationalism (perspectivism), his famous claim that "God is dead", his emphasis on interpretation, and the role of the "overman" in his thought. There are interpretive questions, addressed by different readers, about whether Nietzsche is a "political" or a "personal" thinker and about what Americans of varied political persuasions have found worthwhile in this markedly undemocratic philosopher. The approach of the book tends to be historicist. Ratner-Rosenhagen tries to show how different American interpretations of Nietzsche surfaced in response to changes in American culture.
The book begins with a brief consideration of Nietszsche himself and of Emerson's influence. The book proceeds largely chronologically with Nietzsche's early American reception and the first translations of his books. Subsequent early chapters discuss religious responses to Nietzsche, the struggle of American thinkers to understand the "ubermensch" and Nietszsche's role as an educator. Following an "interlude" in which Ratner-Rosenhagen examines the reaction to Nietzsche by many ordinary Americans, the book resumes with Walter Kaufmann, existentialism, and then late 20th Century readings of Nietzsche, returning at the end to the American philosopher, Emerson.
The most recurring philosophical idea in this book is anti-foundationalism, a position the author appears to share enthusiastically with Nietzsche and Emerson. There remains strong philosophical thinking in the United States that cannot be characterized as "anti-foundational" including, the thought of Royce and Alan Bloom, among the thinkers she discusses, as well as many others of varying persuasions. Perhaps the author takes anti-foundationalism too much for granted.
This book is an extraordinary study. It reawakened me to think again about Nietzsche in the company of the American pragmatists I have been reading for some years. The book will be of great value to readers with a serious interest in Nietzsche, American culture, American thought, and the play of the mind.
Robin Friedman
March 5, 2012
Nietzsche is a Rorschach blot for Americans: blue collar workers, housewives, Christians, political activists, artists, intellectuals. Americans see in Nietzsche what they most desire--freedom from the dead morals of a corrupt and decadent consumer society. And they see in Nietzsche what they most fear--a world without ultimate justification other than what the self can justify to itself, by itself. Ratner-Rosenhagen documents America's wide-ranging, disparate fascinations with Nietzsche in a fluent, fast paced, transfixing intellectual history that falters only a little at the end.
Nietzsche was barely noticed during his lifetime. What also has gone unnoticed is the influence of Emerson on him. As an avid and lifelong reader of Emerson's Essays Nietzsche arrived at his concept of the "sovereign self."From Emerson Nietzsche learned to become a self-reliant, intellectual provocateur. It may have been the Emerson in Nietzsche that struck such a resonant chord in Nietzsche's American audience. Whatever the reason, Americans enthusiastically thought through Nietzsche to think about themselves as Americans in a modern America.
Many Americans remembered where they were when they first read Nietzsche, such was the effect of his words on them. For many, Nietzsche represented deliverance from the reigning--and competing--material/Christian world views. For political radicals, more in tune with European thought currents than most of their fellow citizens, Nietzsche represented a philosophical dawn that they hoped would break in America. In any case, Nietzsche represented a successful challenge to existing authority. Notwithstanding Nietzsche's diverse appeal, however, the American mainstream media either ignored him or downplayed him. For many, this was just further evidence of America's intellectual philistinism.
Bad press aside, Nietzsche still became an American celebrity. And yet there was a tension between the new celebrity's criticism of progressivism's regressive effects on the one hand, and America's native progressivism and democratic optimism on the other.
This was evident in the response of Christians to Nietzsche's attack on Christianity. Many American Christians embraced him, not to dispense with their faith but the strengthen it. Nietzsche forced them to confront the question: What is a modern Christian? Liberal Protestants understood the answer to Nietzsche as a reinvigorating call to social ethics; they accordingly took their theology into the public square. Nietzsche showed them that their ideas could be worth living.
The person of Nietzsche exercised particular influence on American literacy radicals and political reformers. They described Nietzsche with intoxicatingly intimate terms, as though he had invented his philosophy for them personally. His life was the template for their ideal lives. The backlash against Nietzsche during WWI merely confirmed in their minds the power of his pen and personality. Nietzsche taught them that ideas were experience and words were action. And that the wages of genius were bitter indeed.
Out of their experience with Nietzsche was born that peculiarly American discipline, cultrual criticism. Truth was not to be tested against the world as it was, but against the world as the critic wished it to be. Writers and thinkers such as Walter Lippmann understood, however, that it wasn't enough to tear down America's cherished philosophy of ends--something had to replace it. But what? Nietzsche showed Americans only the method by which to attack cherished ideals. The radicals and reformers would have to themselves identify the replacement ideals.
It wasn't just intellectual and political elites who found inspiration in Nietzsche's life and works. Ordinary Americans saw in Nietzsche a long wished-for deliverance from the dead hand of Christianity and the bankrupt promises of market capitalism. Judging from the historical record, many Americans lived lives of quiet desperation, feeling themselves to be radical "others." Nietzsche injected their lives with courage.
Nietzsche was dead by the time he had gained popular hold over the American imagination, so his devotees wrote to his sister, fervently seeking some sacred icon--a photograph, and autograph, a book from his library--by which they could tangibly possess Nietzsche. Because, according to the author, Nietzsche had possessed them. He had possessed them in some cases as a demiurge; letters to Nietzsche's sister often referred to him by capitalizing the males pronouns "Him" and "He." Letter writers volunteered to translate his works and spread them through America, to make his words flesh.
Ordinary Americans were exhilarated--and appalled--by Nietzsche's concept of the overman. Through the lens of the overman, Americans viewed the highs and lows of moral life and democracy. Intellectuals like Josiah Royce saw the overman as the way to create ultimate value in a world without inherent ultimate value. Others, like Irving Babbitt, saw the overman as a dangerous, destructive idea that ultimately undermined all value. With the advent of WWI, American opinion swung toward Babbitt's point of view. The overman, as realized by Imperial Germany, was a threat to modern civilization.
If WWI wasn't enough to cool American's enthusiasm for Nietzsche, the Nazis were. It was left to the scholarship of a young Jewish scholar and refugee from Nazi Germany named Walter Kaufmann to rehabilitate Nietzsche's reputation among Americans. Kaufmann believed Nietzsche was a serious philosopher who fit comfortably within the Enlightenment tradition. Kaufmann's rhetorical genius was to recast Nietzsche as an answer to America's Cold War anxieties, such as the public concern over collectivist movements and ideologies.
According to Kaufmann, Nietzsche was not a totalitarian, but more akin to rational pragmatists in the tradition of James and Dewey. Rather than appeal to external authority to justify his ideas, Nietzsche preached that ideas must justify themselves. Thus, it was not power but personal autonomy that formed the core of Nietzsche's philosophy. This was an message that Americans were ready to hear, though many in the 60s, such as the Black Panthers (like their activist predecessors from the turn of the century), mistook Nietzsche's gospel of self realization for a call to political activism.
Then in the 70s and 80s the French got ahold of Nietzsche. And here is where the book regrettably ends, for the author's aim is to show that American philosophy, analytic and anti-Continental though it may be, is cross-fertilized by European thinkers. Except the postmodernists and deconstructionists are to thinking what speaking in tongues is to conversation. Their ugly and eccentric jargon acts as a sort of secret handshake to the initiated, which must be a small group indeed. The rest of us must simply respond with, "Huh?"
I confess a strong bias against this particular French school, if I haven't confessed it already. It is difficult to understand someone who insists nothing can be understood, at least in a way that is ordinarily understood. In the final chapter, the author tries to make the likes of Rorty, Derrida, and Foucault relevant to Americans. She fails. Just because Nietzsche struck a spark in the American moral imagination doesn't mean that philosophers who were professional Nietzsche readers had a similar, or even remotely similar, effect. They did not, and her chapter on the French is just an insider's shout out to the insular world of academe from somewhere inside it.
But the disappointing final chapter does not detract from what is otherwise an amazing intellectual history of the influence of Nietzsche on the American mind. He was exactly what Americans needed him to be when they needed him to be it: divine prophet of the sovereign self, political radical, destroyer of religious and moral idols, and totalitarian demon. While Americans may never have understood Nietzsche perfectly, or even at all, they certainly came to understand themselves through him.
Nietzsche was barely noticed during his lifetime. What also has gone unnoticed is the influence of Emerson on him. As an avid and lifelong reader of Emerson's Essays Nietzsche arrived at his concept of the "sovereign self."From Emerson Nietzsche learned to become a self-reliant, intellectual provocateur. It may have been the Emerson in Nietzsche that struck such a resonant chord in Nietzsche's American audience. Whatever the reason, Americans enthusiastically thought through Nietzsche to think about themselves as Americans in a modern America.
Many Americans remembered where they were when they first read Nietzsche, such was the effect of his words on them. For many, Nietzsche represented deliverance from the reigning--and competing--material/Christian world views. For political radicals, more in tune with European thought currents than most of their fellow citizens, Nietzsche represented a philosophical dawn that they hoped would break in America. In any case, Nietzsche represented a successful challenge to existing authority. Notwithstanding Nietzsche's diverse appeal, however, the American mainstream media either ignored him or downplayed him. For many, this was just further evidence of America's intellectual philistinism.
Bad press aside, Nietzsche still became an American celebrity. And yet there was a tension between the new celebrity's criticism of progressivism's regressive effects on the one hand, and America's native progressivism and democratic optimism on the other.
This was evident in the response of Christians to Nietzsche's attack on Christianity. Many American Christians embraced him, not to dispense with their faith but the strengthen it. Nietzsche forced them to confront the question: What is a modern Christian? Liberal Protestants understood the answer to Nietzsche as a reinvigorating call to social ethics; they accordingly took their theology into the public square. Nietzsche showed them that their ideas could be worth living.
The person of Nietzsche exercised particular influence on American literacy radicals and political reformers. They described Nietzsche with intoxicatingly intimate terms, as though he had invented his philosophy for them personally. His life was the template for their ideal lives. The backlash against Nietzsche during WWI merely confirmed in their minds the power of his pen and personality. Nietzsche taught them that ideas were experience and words were action. And that the wages of genius were bitter indeed.
Out of their experience with Nietzsche was born that peculiarly American discipline, cultrual criticism. Truth was not to be tested against the world as it was, but against the world as the critic wished it to be. Writers and thinkers such as Walter Lippmann understood, however, that it wasn't enough to tear down America's cherished philosophy of ends--something had to replace it. But what? Nietzsche showed Americans only the method by which to attack cherished ideals. The radicals and reformers would have to themselves identify the replacement ideals.
It wasn't just intellectual and political elites who found inspiration in Nietzsche's life and works. Ordinary Americans saw in Nietzsche a long wished-for deliverance from the dead hand of Christianity and the bankrupt promises of market capitalism. Judging from the historical record, many Americans lived lives of quiet desperation, feeling themselves to be radical "others." Nietzsche injected their lives with courage.
Nietzsche was dead by the time he had gained popular hold over the American imagination, so his devotees wrote to his sister, fervently seeking some sacred icon--a photograph, and autograph, a book from his library--by which they could tangibly possess Nietzsche. Because, according to the author, Nietzsche had possessed them. He had possessed them in some cases as a demiurge; letters to Nietzsche's sister often referred to him by capitalizing the males pronouns "Him" and "He." Letter writers volunteered to translate his works and spread them through America, to make his words flesh.
Ordinary Americans were exhilarated--and appalled--by Nietzsche's concept of the overman. Through the lens of the overman, Americans viewed the highs and lows of moral life and democracy. Intellectuals like Josiah Royce saw the overman as the way to create ultimate value in a world without inherent ultimate value. Others, like Irving Babbitt, saw the overman as a dangerous, destructive idea that ultimately undermined all value. With the advent of WWI, American opinion swung toward Babbitt's point of view. The overman, as realized by Imperial Germany, was a threat to modern civilization.
If WWI wasn't enough to cool American's enthusiasm for Nietzsche, the Nazis were. It was left to the scholarship of a young Jewish scholar and refugee from Nazi Germany named Walter Kaufmann to rehabilitate Nietzsche's reputation among Americans. Kaufmann believed Nietzsche was a serious philosopher who fit comfortably within the Enlightenment tradition. Kaufmann's rhetorical genius was to recast Nietzsche as an answer to America's Cold War anxieties, such as the public concern over collectivist movements and ideologies.
According to Kaufmann, Nietzsche was not a totalitarian, but more akin to rational pragmatists in the tradition of James and Dewey. Rather than appeal to external authority to justify his ideas, Nietzsche preached that ideas must justify themselves. Thus, it was not power but personal autonomy that formed the core of Nietzsche's philosophy. This was an message that Americans were ready to hear, though many in the 60s, such as the Black Panthers (like their activist predecessors from the turn of the century), mistook Nietzsche's gospel of self realization for a call to political activism.
Then in the 70s and 80s the French got ahold of Nietzsche. And here is where the book regrettably ends, for the author's aim is to show that American philosophy, analytic and anti-Continental though it may be, is cross-fertilized by European thinkers. Except the postmodernists and deconstructionists are to thinking what speaking in tongues is to conversation. Their ugly and eccentric jargon acts as a sort of secret handshake to the initiated, which must be a small group indeed. The rest of us must simply respond with, "Huh?"
I confess a strong bias against this particular French school, if I haven't confessed it already. It is difficult to understand someone who insists nothing can be understood, at least in a way that is ordinarily understood. In the final chapter, the author tries to make the likes of Rorty, Derrida, and Foucault relevant to Americans. She fails. Just because Nietzsche struck a spark in the American moral imagination doesn't mean that philosophers who were professional Nietzsche readers had a similar, or even remotely similar, effect. They did not, and her chapter on the French is just an insider's shout out to the insular world of academe from somewhere inside it.
But the disappointing final chapter does not detract from what is otherwise an amazing intellectual history of the influence of Nietzsche on the American mind. He was exactly what Americans needed him to be when they needed him to be it: divine prophet of the sovereign self, political radical, destroyer of religious and moral idols, and totalitarian demon. While Americans may never have understood Nietzsche perfectly, or even at all, they certainly came to understand themselves through him.
January 11, 2012
In an article I wrote on my personal blog about the infamous prosecution of John T Scopes, an American teacher put on trial in 1925 in Dayton, Tennessee for teaching the Darwinian view of evolution, contrary to local law, I made the point that Clarence Darrow, Scope’s defence attorney, was an enthusiast for the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, as well as the biology of Charles Darwin.
He was influenced here by H. L. Mencken, a leading American journalist. It was Mencken who introduced the German thinker to America in his 1908 book The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. His Nietzsche came as an angry Moses, a prophet armed, ready to knock away the cosy nostrums of American life. The strong only grow stronger by despising the weak and, so far as Mencken was concerned, by despising Christian morality. The Scopes trial was an ideal opportunity to pour scorn on “booboisie”, the backward ignoramuses of the Southern Bible Belt.
That’s one American perspective on Nietzsche. Interestingly a totally different one was to come from another participant in the Scopes trial - William Jennings Bryant, a former presidential candidate, who acted for the prosecution. The year before he appeared at the trial of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb – this time for the defence -, both accused of the kidnap and murder of a teenage boy, for no better reason than to prove that they were Supermen, beyond all conventional notions of good and evil. At least that was Darrow’s argument, claiming that they were acting under the influence of Beyond Good and Evil!
Bryant won both cases, clear in the first (at least insofar as his clients escaped the death penalty), pyrrhic in the second. But perhaps his more immediate victory was over Mencken and Nietzsche. His view certainly was more in harmony with American thought, insofar as Americans thought of Nietzsche at all. After all, this was a thinker contaminated by association with German militarism, then even more contaminated by association with the Nazis. What is the philosophy of an anti-Christian, antidemocratic madman doing in a culture like ours? Why Nietzsche? Why in America?
Actually these questions are not mine. They are posed by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen in American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas, published by the University of Chicago Press at the beginning of last month. The answers she makes clear in the course of this lively, thoughtful and entertaining book. It begins with America and it ends with America; or, rather, it begins with American thought and ends with American thought. You see, when I was a teenager I was reading Nietzsche; when Nietzsche was a teenager he was reading Emerson!
It was in the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson that Nietzsche found a “brother soul”, as he puts it. Here was a thinker free from all inherited burden, a believer in the sovereignty of the self, full of scepticism about traditional morality and received religion. “The most fertile author this century so far has been an American”, he declared. Nietzsche used Emerson not to get closer to him but to get closer to himself, as Ratner-Rosenhagen puts it. I would simply add that Americans, in their various ways, have used Nietzsche to get closer to themselves.
To use the cliché, here is a man and a thinker who has been all things to all people. His admirers did not just include obvious social Darwinists like Mencken, but Emma Goldman and others on the left, who saw Nietzsche’s attacks on democracy and religion as a way of arousing the masses from their lethargy.
He was also admired by Jack London, a socialist whose views on the ‘degeneracy’ of the herd are not so far removed from those of Mencken. There is also Margaret Sanger, the high-priestess of American birth control, who read Nietzsche selectively, attracted to his views on Christian sexual ethics, ignoring his obvious misogyny.
That’s just the thing about Nietzsche and America – he has been read selectively, something the author herself is mildly guilty of, a point I’ll come to a bit later. He has been sanitised, if you like, made acceptable to an American audience, a democratic audience; an audience where every man, and woman, has the capacity for endless self-discovery. It’s the Superman as the ordinary man!
It’s true that his reputation suffered – unjustly – by association with the Nazis, but after the war America was given a new reading. Here was a soulful voyager for the existential age, an interpretation advanced – irony of ironies – by Walter Kaufmann, a Jewish scholar and translator who escaped to the States from Nazi Germany in 1939.
The American Nietzsche, as Ratner-Rosenhagen makes clear in a dedicated chapter, is largely Kaufmann’s Nietzsche. I have to be frank and say it’s a slightly dishonest interpretation, more wholesome and less challenging than the raw original!
In some of the more bizarre readings I’m reminded of the character of Otto in the movie A Fish Called Wanda, who, when accused of being an ape, said that apes don’t read philosophy. “Yes they do, Otto”, came Wanda’s response, “They just don’t understand it.” How else is one to interpret the view of Huey Newton, the co-founder of the Black Panther Movement, that Nietzsche thought “slave morality” was a good thing?!
One of my favourite chapters is devoted to the ‘fan mail’ sent by ordinary and unknown Americans and kept by Elizabeth, the philosopher’s Nazi-sympathising sister, a woman who did more to poison his legacy than any other individual. Some of theses missives are beyond eccentric. There is one letter of condolence sent after the philosopher’s death in 1900 by John I Bush of Duluth, Minnesota, who announced to Elizabeth that he was the Superman her brother had been looking for;
May you hereby have the consolation and delight to have lived long enough to know that the visions, prophecies, and hopes of your brother have been fulfilled to the very letter; for the author of this scribbling is the very man prognosticated in Zarathustra.
Bush, hmm; is there any connection here, I wonder?
Now, I said earlier that the author is slightly guilty over her own misreading. Her book, she claims, is less about Nietzsche than interpretations of Nietzsche. But if she begins with Emerson she also ends with Emerson by way of Harold Bloom, Stanley Cavell and Richard Rorty, all of whom have tamed Nietzsche to a degree, leaving out his more anti-democratic sentiments.
Yes, it’s Nietzsche by way of Emerson, a transcendentalist, free of the sarcasm and aggression so evident in his manner of thought and mode of expression. This is a philosopher for all seasons, a philosopher for an American season. It is perhaps a misreading, but who cares. I’m sure Nietzsche, the greatest of all of the great iconoclasts, would have loved it, as much as I loved this book, as much as I admire a country and a people who are continually striving for fresh and novel interpretations. It’s the very thing that keeps thought alive.
He was influenced here by H. L. Mencken, a leading American journalist. It was Mencken who introduced the German thinker to America in his 1908 book The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. His Nietzsche came as an angry Moses, a prophet armed, ready to knock away the cosy nostrums of American life. The strong only grow stronger by despising the weak and, so far as Mencken was concerned, by despising Christian morality. The Scopes trial was an ideal opportunity to pour scorn on “booboisie”, the backward ignoramuses of the Southern Bible Belt.
That’s one American perspective on Nietzsche. Interestingly a totally different one was to come from another participant in the Scopes trial - William Jennings Bryant, a former presidential candidate, who acted for the prosecution. The year before he appeared at the trial of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb – this time for the defence -, both accused of the kidnap and murder of a teenage boy, for no better reason than to prove that they were Supermen, beyond all conventional notions of good and evil. At least that was Darrow’s argument, claiming that they were acting under the influence of Beyond Good and Evil!
Bryant won both cases, clear in the first (at least insofar as his clients escaped the death penalty), pyrrhic in the second. But perhaps his more immediate victory was over Mencken and Nietzsche. His view certainly was more in harmony with American thought, insofar as Americans thought of Nietzsche at all. After all, this was a thinker contaminated by association with German militarism, then even more contaminated by association with the Nazis. What is the philosophy of an anti-Christian, antidemocratic madman doing in a culture like ours? Why Nietzsche? Why in America?
Actually these questions are not mine. They are posed by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen in American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas, published by the University of Chicago Press at the beginning of last month. The answers she makes clear in the course of this lively, thoughtful and entertaining book. It begins with America and it ends with America; or, rather, it begins with American thought and ends with American thought. You see, when I was a teenager I was reading Nietzsche; when Nietzsche was a teenager he was reading Emerson!
It was in the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson that Nietzsche found a “brother soul”, as he puts it. Here was a thinker free from all inherited burden, a believer in the sovereignty of the self, full of scepticism about traditional morality and received religion. “The most fertile author this century so far has been an American”, he declared. Nietzsche used Emerson not to get closer to him but to get closer to himself, as Ratner-Rosenhagen puts it. I would simply add that Americans, in their various ways, have used Nietzsche to get closer to themselves.
To use the cliché, here is a man and a thinker who has been all things to all people. His admirers did not just include obvious social Darwinists like Mencken, but Emma Goldman and others on the left, who saw Nietzsche’s attacks on democracy and religion as a way of arousing the masses from their lethargy.
He was also admired by Jack London, a socialist whose views on the ‘degeneracy’ of the herd are not so far removed from those of Mencken. There is also Margaret Sanger, the high-priestess of American birth control, who read Nietzsche selectively, attracted to his views on Christian sexual ethics, ignoring his obvious misogyny.
That’s just the thing about Nietzsche and America – he has been read selectively, something the author herself is mildly guilty of, a point I’ll come to a bit later. He has been sanitised, if you like, made acceptable to an American audience, a democratic audience; an audience where every man, and woman, has the capacity for endless self-discovery. It’s the Superman as the ordinary man!
It’s true that his reputation suffered – unjustly – by association with the Nazis, but after the war America was given a new reading. Here was a soulful voyager for the existential age, an interpretation advanced – irony of ironies – by Walter Kaufmann, a Jewish scholar and translator who escaped to the States from Nazi Germany in 1939.
The American Nietzsche, as Ratner-Rosenhagen makes clear in a dedicated chapter, is largely Kaufmann’s Nietzsche. I have to be frank and say it’s a slightly dishonest interpretation, more wholesome and less challenging than the raw original!
In some of the more bizarre readings I’m reminded of the character of Otto in the movie A Fish Called Wanda, who, when accused of being an ape, said that apes don’t read philosophy. “Yes they do, Otto”, came Wanda’s response, “They just don’t understand it.” How else is one to interpret the view of Huey Newton, the co-founder of the Black Panther Movement, that Nietzsche thought “slave morality” was a good thing?!
One of my favourite chapters is devoted to the ‘fan mail’ sent by ordinary and unknown Americans and kept by Elizabeth, the philosopher’s Nazi-sympathising sister, a woman who did more to poison his legacy than any other individual. Some of theses missives are beyond eccentric. There is one letter of condolence sent after the philosopher’s death in 1900 by John I Bush of Duluth, Minnesota, who announced to Elizabeth that he was the Superman her brother had been looking for;
May you hereby have the consolation and delight to have lived long enough to know that the visions, prophecies, and hopes of your brother have been fulfilled to the very letter; for the author of this scribbling is the very man prognosticated in Zarathustra.
Bush, hmm; is there any connection here, I wonder?
Now, I said earlier that the author is slightly guilty over her own misreading. Her book, she claims, is less about Nietzsche than interpretations of Nietzsche. But if she begins with Emerson she also ends with Emerson by way of Harold Bloom, Stanley Cavell and Richard Rorty, all of whom have tamed Nietzsche to a degree, leaving out his more anti-democratic sentiments.
Yes, it’s Nietzsche by way of Emerson, a transcendentalist, free of the sarcasm and aggression so evident in his manner of thought and mode of expression. This is a philosopher for all seasons, a philosopher for an American season. It is perhaps a misreading, but who cares. I’m sure Nietzsche, the greatest of all of the great iconoclasts, would have loved it, as much as I loved this book, as much as I admire a country and a people who are continually striving for fresh and novel interpretations. It’s the very thing that keeps thought alive.
May 28, 2015
There's, like, 120% of a book here, but it's broken into parts: there's 80% of a brilliant intellectual history of America from the 1890s to around World War I; and then there's 40% of an informative, but much more constrained, intellectual history from the 1950s to the 1990s. The first would rate four stars; the second two: and so the compromise is three. They are awkwardly welded together with an interlude, which, I guess, is unrated.
JRR wants to examine how Americans made sense of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche--his ideas and persona--as reports about him and his writing started percolating to America in the 1890s, shortly before he died, and he became a central touchstone in the years leading up to World War II for numerous intellectual groups in America. Early on, she writes that the book
“seeks to demonstrate that reception history can be more ambitious than simply enumerating the varieties of uses of a thinker or a body of thought in a new national context. While it shows that a multitude of ‘American Nietzsches” have appeared over the course of the century, it is not content with exposing sheer variety. Rather, this study argues that confrontations with Nietzsche laid bare fundamental concern driving modern American thought: namely, the question of the grounds, or foundations, for modern American thought and the culture itself. First, it shows how American encounters with Nietzsche ignited and revealed larger anxieties about the source and authority of modern pluralist society. Second, it demonstrates how Americans’ engagement with Nietzsche inspired and exposed long-standing concerns about the conditions of American culture for intellectual life.”
which overestimates the historiographic novelty of her approach but does a good job of constraining the narrative: not every way in which Nietzsche might have been imagined in America, but ways that Nietzsche and his thought were used to understand what authority meant, and whether America could ever create a great culture.
The earliest parts give a brief biography of Nietzsche, emphasizing, ironically, that he was especially influenced by the American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, an inheritance that was mostly--although not entirely--ignored until the 1990s. She suggests, subtly, that one reason Americans might have been (relatively) quick to pick up on Nietzsche is that he was so connected with main lines of American thought, even if those associations were sometimes hard to see.
The first official chapter gives an overview of her argument, showing how the questions raised by Nietzsche were pressing for Americans. In brief, Nietzsche argued that there were no firm, foundational forms of knowledge or values--they were historical creations that changed over time. The person willing to accept that we lived in a world without foundations, though, did not despair over the imminent ending of civilization, but imagined new forms of life, and strove to transcend the conditions of the world in some not-entirely-clear way. As reports about him and his ideas trickled into America during the 1890s, he became--as one philosopher said--the enfant terrible of modernism, raising questions about how a mass, industrial society was to deal with its inheritance of traditions and religion. These questions, though, JRR emphasizes, were not exclusive to the intellectual caste, but cut across high and low brow writing. (Indeed, consideration of Nietzsche helped give rise to that distinction.)
Most prominent among the early adopters--besides the students of philosophy who traveled to Germany for education (at the time Germany's universities were the best in the world) and discovered him in informal ways--were left-leaning progressives and liberationists, socialists and anarchists and other radicals looking for an excuse to brush away past traditions and usher in a new world. He was strongly associated with Egoism. His personal story was especially impressive, a sickly man who battled to expose his soul in searching ways, eventually driven mad by it all (As the story went), And that fit with the tenor of the radicals's projects. presented all of these people with an important new 'critical mode' of thought--a gigantic naysayer. At the same time, his devotees had to struggle with not letting Nietzsche become Nietzscheism, a mere worshipping of his thought as though it presented the end of philosophy rather than an enjoinder to continue.
The only little nagging doubt this first chapter leaves is that all of his early interpreters were necessarily limited in what they could see: while the author, JRR, somehow stands outside of time and history and can understood the full Nietzsche. She does provide some evidence as the book progresses, pointing to aspects of Nietzsche's thoughts that particular interpreters missed or ignored. Still: no one can have the definitive interpretation of Nietzsche. And this problem will especially hurt the second of the two books here.
The second chapter looks at religious responses to Nietzsche: that theologians felt the need to deal with an atheistic German philosopher already shows that he had become important in America, even if he remained outside the academy in his homeland. JRR notes a continuum of responses to Nietzsche that add--subtly and more--to our understanding f religion at this time. Typically, the mainline of American religion at the beginning of the twentieth century is glossed as liberal, progressive, and open to secular knowledge: it is religious leaders who are so often involved in the progressive movement. But Nietzsche challenged that orientation. Here was a secular philosopher who presented not just material or scientific evidence to which religion needed to adapt--but undermine the very notion of religion as a repository of eternal verities.
This attack made (some) liberal protestants question their receptivity to secular knowledge and wonder if they shouldn't turn back to faith alone. Other liberals protestants were more amenable to Nietzsche: they saw in him, for example, a version of the pragmatist philosophy that was then dominant in America. The question wasn't whether any particular value or tradition was handed down from God, but which values worked the best in society: it was a matter of experimentation. On the far end of this line of thought stood the Chicago theologian George Burman Foster, who raised Nietzsche to a kind of Christ-like status. Meanwhile, the historical Christ was reduced to an exemplary person, a model, but not the giver of laws. There was no path back to the old time religion, Foster, said, only a Nietzschean path forward, in which there are no ultimate, objective foundations of life, but a longing for a more encompassing, more lusty (but not lustful) existence. It is little surprise, then, that Foster found a friend in Margaret Anderson, publisher of the seminal Little Review in Chicago, and part of that city's (modernist) literary renaissance.
Catholic theologians, in particular, were opposed to Nietzsche's ideas but thought that his coming was good. Religion had become too soft, they thought, and Nietzsche forced them to defend their views, to strengthen themselves. In this matter, then, it wasn't so much that the theologians used Nietzsche, or appropriated him, but that they were responding to him. This train of thought also ran into the muscular Christianity of the day and also intersected with concerns over the feminization of culture—thus connecting the Nietzsche industry to broader concerns about—as JRR said—the possibility of creating a genuine culture in America.
The third chapter looks into how Americans understood the concept of the Ubermensch—what became known in American culture as the Superman. This was the human replacement of God in Nietzsche’s thought, someone who understood the he historicity of all values, who stripped himself (metaphysically) naked and—rather than despair—plunged into he maelstrom of life, creating a being so strong and wonderful, so transcendental—in its way—that the person would be fine living that same life again and again for all of history. (In many ways this was a response to Goethe’s Faustian tragedy.) There came to be two (general) ways in which Nietzsche’s superman was understood in American culture.
The first was that there was a divide in society itself, between the masters and the slaves, the ubermensch and the hoi polloi. Interestingly, this ideal of the superman was even taken up by feminists, such as Margaret Sanger, who used it to critique and un-glorify traditional notions of motherhood. H. L. Mencken, particularly, absorbed this strain of Nietzsche and incorporated it into his writing throughout his life—it was the basis for his dismissal of the low brow, the Booboisie. Through Mencken—and others—this Nietzschean set of ideas also set the stage for the historical (re)construction of the Puritan as a grumpy Philistine and squasher of all things good. JRR notes that before this period, the Puritan was a known historical figure, but with no particular dour valences.
Others saw the dynamic that Nietzsche described—between master and slave, about the will to power—not so much as a critique of mass democracy or a worry that America, as a mass, industrialized society, could never have a true culture, but as an internal, psychological dynamic inherent in each person: each person had parts of themselves that were rooted in convention and failed to live up to the standard of the superman, and each person was meant to sound themselves, find those parts, and uproot them. Among this cadre of thinkers was the radical Randolph Bourne—who, dying at 32, never had a chance to fully mature his thought. Bourne complained that those like Mencken threatened to create their own rigid value system based around Nietzsche, rather than constantly challenging themselves, and it is certainly true that Mencken, through life, became increasingly self-satisfied.
Chapter three then switches focus somewhat and starts to conclude the first part of the book—when it was really only 80% done. What JRR has done to this point is smart and shows a vast amount of reading. It is nuanced and attuned to historical ironies—the way Christians used Nietzsche, for example—as well as novelty: the puritan being a historical revision created in the wake of Nietzsche’s thought. And the book to this point has been elegantly written with a minimum of jargon, and a nice use of narrative markers to keep the book and reader on track.
The part that is missing, though, is any critique of science. Nietzsche pulled the rug out from under all systems of thought, not just religious but scientific, too. And there were scientific critics at the time—some were inspired by another German thinker Max Weber (and one does wonder if there was an overlap in Nietzschean interpretations and Weberian ones, but JRR never deals with this issue). Some were explicitly Nietzschean, as in the case of Ben Hecht—who is mentioned but not really studied. It is almost as if JRR is as constrained in her interpretations as Mencken himself: who used Nietzsche to critique old time religion and Victorian morals, but held science apart from any such critique. There was a sociology of knowledge being developed at the time—admittedly, much of it in Germany, or among Marxists (Ludwig Fleck, Karl Mannheim, Boris Hessen)—and some of it was focused on science in particular, but this all goes unexplored. It’s why the first book is only 80% complete.
What JRR does in the rest of the chapter is sow the seeds for Nietzsche’s eventual decline in America during World War I and again around the time of the second world war. There were, of course, straight critics of Nietzsche among the intellectual class, as well as among Theologians, in particular the New Humanists, who tried to dismiss the German philosopher as an extension of Romanticism’s twaddle. But, as JRR shows, in constructing this version of Nietzsche they had to ignore his own critiques of Romanticism, particularly Rousseau. More damning for Nietzsche were political changes: As German bellicosity increased and the world was drawn into war, Nietzsche was reinterpreted as a kind of id of the German national identity: idealistic, concerned with power and aesthetics, willing to go to battle for his ideas. The Superman was stripped of its reconstructive possibilities and became a purely destructive idea: that the Germans believed a superior form of humans needed to smash the world and rule its wreckage.
Chapter four looks more closely at the radical intellectuals inspired by Nietzsche. JRR seems to suggest that it is an open question whether Nietzsche had a lasting influence on them—but he did shape the thought of the time, and they did have immediate, often visceral, reactions, and she is interested in capturing these as part of the lived experience of this cohort. (Another way this book is brilliant, bringing the history of the body into intellectual history.) Nietzsche emboldened literary radicals and taught them that theirs was not jus a generational fight, but the overthrow—the transvaluation—of an entire body of values and traditions; civilization was on the cusp of decline, and they could create a brand new one: a modern one. And there is was, Nietzsche underwriting modernity:
“The task of the modern thinker instead was to balance the deconstructive with the regenerative, to apply the acids of intellect on debilitating beliefs while employing a playful imagination to contemplate the ideals that enliven the spirit.”
“The Gay Science”—the title of which was based on Emerson—was a model for this kind of creative construction, challenging authors to create new realities, new ways in which the human individual could be valorized and made free (against the constraints of mass society, commercialism, and industrial capitalism.) The sheer variety of those influenced by Nietzsche is a testimony to why a book like this needed to be written. There’s Mencken and Bourne, the Chicago Renaissance, Upton Sinclair, and Van Wyck Brooks (who used Nietzsche to help erect the division between high brown and low brow). Emma Goldman, too. And then surprising figures, such as Kahlil Gibran, the Persian emigre whose book “The Prophet” reworked Nietzsche and went on to become a world wide best seller for decades.
Having wrapped up her survey—with the exception of a chapter on science—JRR shifts gears. Following that chapter comes an interlude, with JRR surveying material from Americans at the Nietzsche archive, which was maintained for a long time by his sister. Some themes are continued—such as a focus on the embodied experience readers had when first coming across Nietzsche, and the way Nietzsche’s persona was interwoven with his thought, such that many people asked for something from him, even after he was dead, an autograph for a collection, a photograph. There’s also some discussion of Americans worrying over the quality of the translations, which was in part a worry about the state of American culture and whether it was strong enough to hold onto someone like Nietzsche. But, as JRR admits, these letters are ephemera, and we barely know who the people are. It’s an interesting enough bit of the story, but one feels it could have been integrated into the above thematic chapters rather than pulled out.
But perhaps the reason it is not is because after the interlude, a second book breaks out, again one interesting enough but not as complex, dense, or fascinating as the one we have just left behind. Chapter five deals, mostly, with Walter Kauffman, a German emigre who translated most of Nietzsche into English and became the leading interpreter of his thought from the 1950s through the 1970s. JRR notes that there were some other voices dealing with Nietzsche during the era—when Kauffman was still young—and focuses on another German emigre, Theodor Adorno, who used Nietzsche to critique the entire Enlightenment project: the Nazis, Adorn said, embodied rationality and Enlightenment values, and that was totalitarianism. America, built on those same values, was creating a different kind of totalitarianism, one organized around a culture industry. The Nietzschean individual was being suffocated.
But, Adorno was mostly ignored in his own time, and JRR is mostly fascinated with Kauffman—to the point that this chapter focuses only on him. He is the main interpreter of Nietzsche and so the only one worth exploring at this time, or so she says, which gives this chapter none of the richness, complexity, or nuance of the earlier ones. According to JRR, Kauffman made Nietzsche acceptable to an America that had just fought Germany in a world war for the second time by downplaying his darker aspects and attacks on foundational values and making him seem more of an existentialist thinker, at a time when existentialism from France was influencing American thought. Kauffman also linked Nietzsche to American philosophical pragmatism. And so one could see Nietzsche picked up on the right and the left as a standard-bearer against 1950s’ conformity: bit Peter Vlerick (son of George Sylvester, and a conservative) and Lionel Trilling found him invigorating.
The final chapter regains some of the nuance of the early part of the book, but still seems to be telling a story very different from the first chapters: it is about a rediscovery of another Nietzsche, this one in light of French intellectual fads and the rise of neoConservatism. (It’s worth noting how much of the praise on the back of the book comes from conservative outlets, which is relatively unusual in academic publishing.)
A Nietzsche different than Kauffman’s was reimported into America during the 1970s and 1980s through the translation of French theoreticians, particularly Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. Both of them were drawn to his attacks on the foundations of values—and knowledge. These thinkers would feed int an explicit attack on the authority of science, but, again, JRR shies away from considering this aspect of Nietzschean thought. She does mention, though, that he informed a later generation of feminists, with Eve Kofosky Sedgwick and Judith Butler using him to attack essentialist notions of gender.
Conservatives blanched at these various academic attacks on traditional values and seeming proselytization of relativism—Nietzsche was a sign that the Ivory Tower was bankrupt. Allan Bloom made this point in his The Closing of the American Mind, arguing that until the coming of French theory and Nietzsche, America had been innocent of such heretical thinking. As obviously untrue as this was, Bloom was still a nuanced thinker, and even as he chastised American intellectuals’ embrace of Nietzsche and relativism, he used Nietzsche to show why this was a bad idea: for in an American mass democracy, the burning of the foundations would lead to the mediocre taking control of everything. His student, Francis Fukuyama, expressed similar worries in his The End of History.
There were other thinkers, too, he used Nietzsche’s antifoundationalism in other ways—Richard Rorty, for example. Especially worthwhile here is another conservative thinker, Harold Bloom—unrelated to Allan—who looked at Nietzsche in his study The Anxiety of Influence—which was about how every author is in some kind of Oedipal relationship with the great authors that preceded them. Bringing the story full circle, Harold Bloom noted that Nietzsche was indebted to the American Ralph Waldo Emerson.
And so there is a way in which the two books here interact, and I can see the temptation of yoking them together. Maybe it was even a great idea? What do I know? The author is very smart, and the University of Chicago Press puts out the best academic books, so maybe the two belong under one cover. Whether they do or not, you’re still getting 120%
JRR wants to examine how Americans made sense of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche--his ideas and persona--as reports about him and his writing started percolating to America in the 1890s, shortly before he died, and he became a central touchstone in the years leading up to World War II for numerous intellectual groups in America. Early on, she writes that the book
“seeks to demonstrate that reception history can be more ambitious than simply enumerating the varieties of uses of a thinker or a body of thought in a new national context. While it shows that a multitude of ‘American Nietzsches” have appeared over the course of the century, it is not content with exposing sheer variety. Rather, this study argues that confrontations with Nietzsche laid bare fundamental concern driving modern American thought: namely, the question of the grounds, or foundations, for modern American thought and the culture itself. First, it shows how American encounters with Nietzsche ignited and revealed larger anxieties about the source and authority of modern pluralist society. Second, it demonstrates how Americans’ engagement with Nietzsche inspired and exposed long-standing concerns about the conditions of American culture for intellectual life.”
which overestimates the historiographic novelty of her approach but does a good job of constraining the narrative: not every way in which Nietzsche might have been imagined in America, but ways that Nietzsche and his thought were used to understand what authority meant, and whether America could ever create a great culture.
The earliest parts give a brief biography of Nietzsche, emphasizing, ironically, that he was especially influenced by the American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, an inheritance that was mostly--although not entirely--ignored until the 1990s. She suggests, subtly, that one reason Americans might have been (relatively) quick to pick up on Nietzsche is that he was so connected with main lines of American thought, even if those associations were sometimes hard to see.
The first official chapter gives an overview of her argument, showing how the questions raised by Nietzsche were pressing for Americans. In brief, Nietzsche argued that there were no firm, foundational forms of knowledge or values--they were historical creations that changed over time. The person willing to accept that we lived in a world without foundations, though, did not despair over the imminent ending of civilization, but imagined new forms of life, and strove to transcend the conditions of the world in some not-entirely-clear way. As reports about him and his ideas trickled into America during the 1890s, he became--as one philosopher said--the enfant terrible of modernism, raising questions about how a mass, industrial society was to deal with its inheritance of traditions and religion. These questions, though, JRR emphasizes, were not exclusive to the intellectual caste, but cut across high and low brow writing. (Indeed, consideration of Nietzsche helped give rise to that distinction.)
Most prominent among the early adopters--besides the students of philosophy who traveled to Germany for education (at the time Germany's universities were the best in the world) and discovered him in informal ways--were left-leaning progressives and liberationists, socialists and anarchists and other radicals looking for an excuse to brush away past traditions and usher in a new world. He was strongly associated with Egoism. His personal story was especially impressive, a sickly man who battled to expose his soul in searching ways, eventually driven mad by it all (As the story went), And that fit with the tenor of the radicals's projects. presented all of these people with an important new 'critical mode' of thought--a gigantic naysayer. At the same time, his devotees had to struggle with not letting Nietzsche become Nietzscheism, a mere worshipping of his thought as though it presented the end of philosophy rather than an enjoinder to continue.
The only little nagging doubt this first chapter leaves is that all of his early interpreters were necessarily limited in what they could see: while the author, JRR, somehow stands outside of time and history and can understood the full Nietzsche. She does provide some evidence as the book progresses, pointing to aspects of Nietzsche's thoughts that particular interpreters missed or ignored. Still: no one can have the definitive interpretation of Nietzsche. And this problem will especially hurt the second of the two books here.
The second chapter looks at religious responses to Nietzsche: that theologians felt the need to deal with an atheistic German philosopher already shows that he had become important in America, even if he remained outside the academy in his homeland. JRR notes a continuum of responses to Nietzsche that add--subtly and more--to our understanding f religion at this time. Typically, the mainline of American religion at the beginning of the twentieth century is glossed as liberal, progressive, and open to secular knowledge: it is religious leaders who are so often involved in the progressive movement. But Nietzsche challenged that orientation. Here was a secular philosopher who presented not just material or scientific evidence to which religion needed to adapt--but undermine the very notion of religion as a repository of eternal verities.
This attack made (some) liberal protestants question their receptivity to secular knowledge and wonder if they shouldn't turn back to faith alone. Other liberals protestants were more amenable to Nietzsche: they saw in him, for example, a version of the pragmatist philosophy that was then dominant in America. The question wasn't whether any particular value or tradition was handed down from God, but which values worked the best in society: it was a matter of experimentation. On the far end of this line of thought stood the Chicago theologian George Burman Foster, who raised Nietzsche to a kind of Christ-like status. Meanwhile, the historical Christ was reduced to an exemplary person, a model, but not the giver of laws. There was no path back to the old time religion, Foster, said, only a Nietzschean path forward, in which there are no ultimate, objective foundations of life, but a longing for a more encompassing, more lusty (but not lustful) existence. It is little surprise, then, that Foster found a friend in Margaret Anderson, publisher of the seminal Little Review in Chicago, and part of that city's (modernist) literary renaissance.
Catholic theologians, in particular, were opposed to Nietzsche's ideas but thought that his coming was good. Religion had become too soft, they thought, and Nietzsche forced them to defend their views, to strengthen themselves. In this matter, then, it wasn't so much that the theologians used Nietzsche, or appropriated him, but that they were responding to him. This train of thought also ran into the muscular Christianity of the day and also intersected with concerns over the feminization of culture—thus connecting the Nietzsche industry to broader concerns about—as JRR said—the possibility of creating a genuine culture in America.
The third chapter looks into how Americans understood the concept of the Ubermensch—what became known in American culture as the Superman. This was the human replacement of God in Nietzsche’s thought, someone who understood the he historicity of all values, who stripped himself (metaphysically) naked and—rather than despair—plunged into he maelstrom of life, creating a being so strong and wonderful, so transcendental—in its way—that the person would be fine living that same life again and again for all of history. (In many ways this was a response to Goethe’s Faustian tragedy.) There came to be two (general) ways in which Nietzsche’s superman was understood in American culture.
The first was that there was a divide in society itself, between the masters and the slaves, the ubermensch and the hoi polloi. Interestingly, this ideal of the superman was even taken up by feminists, such as Margaret Sanger, who used it to critique and un-glorify traditional notions of motherhood. H. L. Mencken, particularly, absorbed this strain of Nietzsche and incorporated it into his writing throughout his life—it was the basis for his dismissal of the low brow, the Booboisie. Through Mencken—and others—this Nietzschean set of ideas also set the stage for the historical (re)construction of the Puritan as a grumpy Philistine and squasher of all things good. JRR notes that before this period, the Puritan was a known historical figure, but with no particular dour valences.
Others saw the dynamic that Nietzsche described—between master and slave, about the will to power—not so much as a critique of mass democracy or a worry that America, as a mass, industrialized society, could never have a true culture, but as an internal, psychological dynamic inherent in each person: each person had parts of themselves that were rooted in convention and failed to live up to the standard of the superman, and each person was meant to sound themselves, find those parts, and uproot them. Among this cadre of thinkers was the radical Randolph Bourne—who, dying at 32, never had a chance to fully mature his thought. Bourne complained that those like Mencken threatened to create their own rigid value system based around Nietzsche, rather than constantly challenging themselves, and it is certainly true that Mencken, through life, became increasingly self-satisfied.
Chapter three then switches focus somewhat and starts to conclude the first part of the book—when it was really only 80% done. What JRR has done to this point is smart and shows a vast amount of reading. It is nuanced and attuned to historical ironies—the way Christians used Nietzsche, for example—as well as novelty: the puritan being a historical revision created in the wake of Nietzsche’s thought. And the book to this point has been elegantly written with a minimum of jargon, and a nice use of narrative markers to keep the book and reader on track.
The part that is missing, though, is any critique of science. Nietzsche pulled the rug out from under all systems of thought, not just religious but scientific, too. And there were scientific critics at the time—some were inspired by another German thinker Max Weber (and one does wonder if there was an overlap in Nietzschean interpretations and Weberian ones, but JRR never deals with this issue). Some were explicitly Nietzschean, as in the case of Ben Hecht—who is mentioned but not really studied. It is almost as if JRR is as constrained in her interpretations as Mencken himself: who used Nietzsche to critique old time religion and Victorian morals, but held science apart from any such critique. There was a sociology of knowledge being developed at the time—admittedly, much of it in Germany, or among Marxists (Ludwig Fleck, Karl Mannheim, Boris Hessen)—and some of it was focused on science in particular, but this all goes unexplored. It’s why the first book is only 80% complete.
What JRR does in the rest of the chapter is sow the seeds for Nietzsche’s eventual decline in America during World War I and again around the time of the second world war. There were, of course, straight critics of Nietzsche among the intellectual class, as well as among Theologians, in particular the New Humanists, who tried to dismiss the German philosopher as an extension of Romanticism’s twaddle. But, as JRR shows, in constructing this version of Nietzsche they had to ignore his own critiques of Romanticism, particularly Rousseau. More damning for Nietzsche were political changes: As German bellicosity increased and the world was drawn into war, Nietzsche was reinterpreted as a kind of id of the German national identity: idealistic, concerned with power and aesthetics, willing to go to battle for his ideas. The Superman was stripped of its reconstructive possibilities and became a purely destructive idea: that the Germans believed a superior form of humans needed to smash the world and rule its wreckage.
Chapter four looks more closely at the radical intellectuals inspired by Nietzsche. JRR seems to suggest that it is an open question whether Nietzsche had a lasting influence on them—but he did shape the thought of the time, and they did have immediate, often visceral, reactions, and she is interested in capturing these as part of the lived experience of this cohort. (Another way this book is brilliant, bringing the history of the body into intellectual history.) Nietzsche emboldened literary radicals and taught them that theirs was not jus a generational fight, but the overthrow—the transvaluation—of an entire body of values and traditions; civilization was on the cusp of decline, and they could create a brand new one: a modern one. And there is was, Nietzsche underwriting modernity:
“The task of the modern thinker instead was to balance the deconstructive with the regenerative, to apply the acids of intellect on debilitating beliefs while employing a playful imagination to contemplate the ideals that enliven the spirit.”
“The Gay Science”—the title of which was based on Emerson—was a model for this kind of creative construction, challenging authors to create new realities, new ways in which the human individual could be valorized and made free (against the constraints of mass society, commercialism, and industrial capitalism.) The sheer variety of those influenced by Nietzsche is a testimony to why a book like this needed to be written. There’s Mencken and Bourne, the Chicago Renaissance, Upton Sinclair, and Van Wyck Brooks (who used Nietzsche to help erect the division between high brown and low brow). Emma Goldman, too. And then surprising figures, such as Kahlil Gibran, the Persian emigre whose book “The Prophet” reworked Nietzsche and went on to become a world wide best seller for decades.
Having wrapped up her survey—with the exception of a chapter on science—JRR shifts gears. Following that chapter comes an interlude, with JRR surveying material from Americans at the Nietzsche archive, which was maintained for a long time by his sister. Some themes are continued—such as a focus on the embodied experience readers had when first coming across Nietzsche, and the way Nietzsche’s persona was interwoven with his thought, such that many people asked for something from him, even after he was dead, an autograph for a collection, a photograph. There’s also some discussion of Americans worrying over the quality of the translations, which was in part a worry about the state of American culture and whether it was strong enough to hold onto someone like Nietzsche. But, as JRR admits, these letters are ephemera, and we barely know who the people are. It’s an interesting enough bit of the story, but one feels it could have been integrated into the above thematic chapters rather than pulled out.
But perhaps the reason it is not is because after the interlude, a second book breaks out, again one interesting enough but not as complex, dense, or fascinating as the one we have just left behind. Chapter five deals, mostly, with Walter Kauffman, a German emigre who translated most of Nietzsche into English and became the leading interpreter of his thought from the 1950s through the 1970s. JRR notes that there were some other voices dealing with Nietzsche during the era—when Kauffman was still young—and focuses on another German emigre, Theodor Adorno, who used Nietzsche to critique the entire Enlightenment project: the Nazis, Adorn said, embodied rationality and Enlightenment values, and that was totalitarianism. America, built on those same values, was creating a different kind of totalitarianism, one organized around a culture industry. The Nietzschean individual was being suffocated.
But, Adorno was mostly ignored in his own time, and JRR is mostly fascinated with Kauffman—to the point that this chapter focuses only on him. He is the main interpreter of Nietzsche and so the only one worth exploring at this time, or so she says, which gives this chapter none of the richness, complexity, or nuance of the earlier ones. According to JRR, Kauffman made Nietzsche acceptable to an America that had just fought Germany in a world war for the second time by downplaying his darker aspects and attacks on foundational values and making him seem more of an existentialist thinker, at a time when existentialism from France was influencing American thought. Kauffman also linked Nietzsche to American philosophical pragmatism. And so one could see Nietzsche picked up on the right and the left as a standard-bearer against 1950s’ conformity: bit Peter Vlerick (son of George Sylvester, and a conservative) and Lionel Trilling found him invigorating.
The final chapter regains some of the nuance of the early part of the book, but still seems to be telling a story very different from the first chapters: it is about a rediscovery of another Nietzsche, this one in light of French intellectual fads and the rise of neoConservatism. (It’s worth noting how much of the praise on the back of the book comes from conservative outlets, which is relatively unusual in academic publishing.)
A Nietzsche different than Kauffman’s was reimported into America during the 1970s and 1980s through the translation of French theoreticians, particularly Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. Both of them were drawn to his attacks on the foundations of values—and knowledge. These thinkers would feed int an explicit attack on the authority of science, but, again, JRR shies away from considering this aspect of Nietzschean thought. She does mention, though, that he informed a later generation of feminists, with Eve Kofosky Sedgwick and Judith Butler using him to attack essentialist notions of gender.
Conservatives blanched at these various academic attacks on traditional values and seeming proselytization of relativism—Nietzsche was a sign that the Ivory Tower was bankrupt. Allan Bloom made this point in his The Closing of the American Mind, arguing that until the coming of French theory and Nietzsche, America had been innocent of such heretical thinking. As obviously untrue as this was, Bloom was still a nuanced thinker, and even as he chastised American intellectuals’ embrace of Nietzsche and relativism, he used Nietzsche to show why this was a bad idea: for in an American mass democracy, the burning of the foundations would lead to the mediocre taking control of everything. His student, Francis Fukuyama, expressed similar worries in his The End of History.
There were other thinkers, too, he used Nietzsche’s antifoundationalism in other ways—Richard Rorty, for example. Especially worthwhile here is another conservative thinker, Harold Bloom—unrelated to Allan—who looked at Nietzsche in his study The Anxiety of Influence—which was about how every author is in some kind of Oedipal relationship with the great authors that preceded them. Bringing the story full circle, Harold Bloom noted that Nietzsche was indebted to the American Ralph Waldo Emerson.
And so there is a way in which the two books here interact, and I can see the temptation of yoking them together. Maybe it was even a great idea? What do I know? The author is very smart, and the University of Chicago Press puts out the best academic books, so maybe the two belong under one cover. Whether they do or not, you’re still getting 120%
Want to read
October 31, 2018"On the other hand, looking back on the success the book had (especially with the great artist to whom it addressed itself, as if in a conversation, that is, with Richard Wagner), the book proved itself—I mean it was the sort of book which at any rate was effective enough among “the best people of its time.” For that reason the book should at this point be handled with some consideration and discretion"
In “The birth tragedy”
She believes Nietzsche was influential in the Black Power movement (and slogan), so with those (Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster) who created the Superman character. However, Ayn Rand and many others (on the right and left wing) could claim an influence as well, despite the negative things Nietzsche said about “women, equality, and democracy”.
Jennifer argues that Nietzsche challenged “universal truths”; he unveiled the “human creations”. The madman of the book ”The Gay Science” screaming in the street “God is dead” is an example of our times. However, the madman, had concluded, from people’s reaction, his time had not yet come.
After the success of the book “The birth tragedy” Nietzsche got to know what a nervous collapse is; as well as a declining state of health, until death.
In “The birth tragedy”
She believes Nietzsche was influential in the Black Power movement (and slogan), so with those (Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster) who created the Superman character. However, Ayn Rand and many others (on the right and left wing) could claim an influence as well, despite the negative things Nietzsche said about “women, equality, and democracy”.
Jennifer argues that Nietzsche challenged “universal truths”; he unveiled the “human creations”. The madman of the book ”The Gay Science” screaming in the street “God is dead” is an example of our times. However, the madman, had concluded, from people’s reaction, his time had not yet come.
After the success of the book “The birth tragedy” Nietzsche got to know what a nervous collapse is; as well as a declining state of health, until death.
May 3, 2015
Some time ago I mentioned to my wife that I’d been experiencing strange existential crises, and I had just noticed and it was odd to me. She replied that perhaps I was having a ‘mid-life crisis’, and yep, because she’s smart and that sounds about right. She thought for a moment and asked if I had read any Nietzsche lately. I considered this wonderful advice as she is trained and degreed in philosophy and has a wonderful mind for such things and I respect her opinions greatly. It’s not like she would or could say ‘have you read your Bible lately?’, so I thought ‘read Nietzsche’ was a splendid suggestion worth exploration. So I hunted around for a work that appealed to me, and I settled on American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas. It appealed to me because of the American perspective and academic qualities. At first the reading was ponderous; dense and difficult. I had only vague recollection of ‘Nietzscheism’, a Will-Durant knowledge of his life and philosophy. I recalled that I thought we were in some agreement. He was an Existentialist, maybe a Nihilist, antireligious and smart. But reading American Nietzsche with that knowledge and recollection of the man and his philosophy was what was making the reading difficult and ponderous. I took a break for other books and then returned but first I elected to read the surprisingly great Nietzsche: A Very Short Introduction by Michael Tanner. It was an excellent read, great overview, nice balance, and not at all surprising given the good reviews. I thought this would be enough preparation but I became so interested to read Friedrich Nietzsche’s words (or at least a good approximation) I chose to read The Antichrist, as translated around 1920 by H.L. Mencken, whom I have always admired as a great American. This book The Antichrist blew me away and I will never forget it, I will revisit it again and again, and I with any luck I will search for other valuable translations of it to read later. I also was inspired to immediately acquire a version of Thus Spoke Zarathustra that I greatly anticipate consuming later. So here the digression ends and I return to American Nietzsche, better-prepared for what lies therein. I re-read the first 20% #Kindle or so that I had managed to get through and picked it up from there. I found myself consumed by its dense material, and I could barely put it down. I found it then to be a quick read (relatively) and marveled at the scholarship, the minutiae, the great attention paid to every detail and myriad angles. It’s fascinating really and as I understand it a new perspective on an essential philosopher. I loved the book, highlighted it galore and I will refer back to it from time-to-time. I feel like when I read Zarathustra it will be like I’m reading the Bible and it may spiritually fill a cold scientific atheist like myself. And all this to relate that at first, I did not understand my wife’s suggestion that I read Nietzsche of all things to address a midlife crisis. But in the end, I found a meaning and substance that surpassed any expectation I had. I learned about myself and the world we live in and it connected dots in my head that make me feel like a better and more evolved human. It’s like my wife told me to listen to Jesus, but said Nietzsche, because of course.
I’d recommend Nietzsche to anyone. This American Nietzsche book is interesting, certainly dense, academic, dwells on small things, repetitive, but it doesn’t create an outsized view as much as illuminates areas of study, ties in interesting and important figures and relates the explosion of Nietzscheism, not because of propaganda or enforcement but because of obviousness and inevitability. It’s an interesting read if you are into that sort of thing but I’d definitely suggest at least a minimal background or it may feel more a slough.
I’d recommend Nietzsche to anyone. This American Nietzsche book is interesting, certainly dense, academic, dwells on small things, repetitive, but it doesn’t create an outsized view as much as illuminates areas of study, ties in interesting and important figures and relates the explosion of Nietzscheism, not because of propaganda or enforcement but because of obviousness and inevitability. It’s an interesting read if you are into that sort of thing but I’d definitely suggest at least a minimal background or it may feel more a slough.
February 9, 2020
UW Madison Professor Jennifer Ratner-Roshenhagen has written here a wonderful volume on the impact of Nietzsche on the United States, of all places. After all, in her own words, "What is the philosophy of an anti-christian, antidemocratic madman doing in a culture like ours? Why Nietzsche? Why in America?...This is not a history of American Nietzscheans. It is a history of American readers making their way into their views of themselves and their modern American by thinking through, against, and around Nietzsche's stark challenges."
Her wonderfully lucid introduction bears out the relationship between the works of Emerson and the more well-known works of Nietzsche. Famously a figure who cast off intellectual forebears with great alacrity, Nietzsche nevertheless maintained a fascination and respect for Emerson's thought throughout his life. This is brought full circle in the final chapter in the work of Cavell attempting to bring Nietzschean thought clearly into the discussion of what was, "American,” and what was, "Continental."
Along the way, Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen takes you through the reception of this singular philosopher by turn of the century American theologians, the New Humanists (Irving Babbitt in particular), the deconstruction of Derrida and the "New French Nietzsche," the conflict of Adorno’s and Kaufmann’s treatments, Richard Rorty, and the impact of, "On the Genealogy of Morals," on the early foundational work of literary critic Harold Bloom. What you get is a very clear treatment of each of these figures while at the same time a lucid presentation as to how they made this philosopher their own, either by distancing his work from his biography, over-obsessing on his life to the detriment of serious study of his work, deliberate obfuscation of certain points of his to make his work more palatable, and many other modes of license-taking
The greatest amount of time is spent on Walter Kaufmann's work in lifting Nietzsche out of the obscurity of postwar thought and lazy association with Germany's martial philosophy and sheer depravity. The prevailing view that the mad philosopher was responsible for the philosophical undergirding of both world war movements was one that was preventing serious discussion of this figure in any substantive way, in academia and more broadly. Once again you see figures trying to cloak their worldview in the garb of great thinkers whom they haven’t read and couldn’t possibly comprehend, but Kaufmann effectively showed this for the utter fatuity it was. His standout profile of Nietzsche is still a principal text in the study of the figure and Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen does an excellent job making his role in the reading and reception of Nietzsche very clear.
In summation this is a wonderfully clear volume on a fascinating figure that should be read by all. Though I wasn't flummoxed by the notion of Nietzsche enjoying success as a subject of American readership and discourse, the author here does a wonderful job chronicling a century's worth of debate on the man and his work.
Her wonderfully lucid introduction bears out the relationship between the works of Emerson and the more well-known works of Nietzsche. Famously a figure who cast off intellectual forebears with great alacrity, Nietzsche nevertheless maintained a fascination and respect for Emerson's thought throughout his life. This is brought full circle in the final chapter in the work of Cavell attempting to bring Nietzschean thought clearly into the discussion of what was, "American,” and what was, "Continental."
Along the way, Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen takes you through the reception of this singular philosopher by turn of the century American theologians, the New Humanists (Irving Babbitt in particular), the deconstruction of Derrida and the "New French Nietzsche," the conflict of Adorno’s and Kaufmann’s treatments, Richard Rorty, and the impact of, "On the Genealogy of Morals," on the early foundational work of literary critic Harold Bloom. What you get is a very clear treatment of each of these figures while at the same time a lucid presentation as to how they made this philosopher their own, either by distancing his work from his biography, over-obsessing on his life to the detriment of serious study of his work, deliberate obfuscation of certain points of his to make his work more palatable, and many other modes of license-taking
The greatest amount of time is spent on Walter Kaufmann's work in lifting Nietzsche out of the obscurity of postwar thought and lazy association with Germany's martial philosophy and sheer depravity. The prevailing view that the mad philosopher was responsible for the philosophical undergirding of both world war movements was one that was preventing serious discussion of this figure in any substantive way, in academia and more broadly. Once again you see figures trying to cloak their worldview in the garb of great thinkers whom they haven’t read and couldn’t possibly comprehend, but Kaufmann effectively showed this for the utter fatuity it was. His standout profile of Nietzsche is still a principal text in the study of the figure and Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen does an excellent job making his role in the reading and reception of Nietzsche very clear.
In summation this is a wonderfully clear volume on a fascinating figure that should be read by all. Though I wasn't flummoxed by the notion of Nietzsche enjoying success as a subject of American readership and discourse, the author here does a wonderful job chronicling a century's worth of debate on the man and his work.
June 23, 2018
This book, Ratner-Rosenhagen asserts, is less about Nietzsche than it is about how Americans appropriated his idea since the late 19th century. Yet she does end up sharing plenty about Nietzsche's life and his philosophy. It's fascinating to learn that an anti-democratic, anti-Christian, and anti-collectivist thinker would be met with such praise—to the extent of worshipping—as Nietzche in the United States.
Specially interesting is how his writings inspired Rosa Luxemburg and Huey P. Newton, although Christians of several denominations, scholars, socialists, and poets also found ways to reshape the philosopher to fit their ideas and ideology.
Ratner-Rosenhagen's masterful research oozes in every page and she mostly writes with sharp and delightful acumen. Yet she tends to exaggerate to what extent Nietzsche's ideas influenced common American life. Despite unconvincing at times, this book is as good as academic writing goes. If Nietzsche sparks your interest, or if you are well-versed in his thoughts, or enjoy intellectual history, this book will enlighten.
Specially interesting is how his writings inspired Rosa Luxemburg and Huey P. Newton, although Christians of several denominations, scholars, socialists, and poets also found ways to reshape the philosopher to fit their ideas and ideology.
Ratner-Rosenhagen's masterful research oozes in every page and she mostly writes with sharp and delightful acumen. Yet she tends to exaggerate to what extent Nietzsche's ideas influenced common American life. Despite unconvincing at times, this book is as good as academic writing goes. If Nietzsche sparks your interest, or if you are well-versed in his thoughts, or enjoy intellectual history, this book will enlighten.
November 10, 2013
Titanic scholarship of the titan philosopher. A bit repetitive, but most lengthy scholarship tends toward repetition. Could really do without some of the antiquarian inspired trivia in the middle sections, her so called "ephemera." A couple of really good reviews here on goodreads already.
As an aside, it's hard not to be a little bewildered at the appropriation of Nietzsche by so many different and politically opposed groups, but his feverish and brilliant ramblings must attract the attention of any intelligent mind that detects tension in the world or in his/her life. Perhaps his celebrity is only a bit more bewildering than the celebrity of say, Elvis. The creation of the celebrity is really what this book is about. It's cultural/intellectual history.
Things do get a little more serious in chapter 5, perhaps the most impressive and serious bit of the book. But one gets the impression that when she writes about Walter Kaufmann, she is really writing about herself. Her attempts to distance herself from Kaufmann are inadequate; she more or less adopts his view. Her obligatory dance with Adorno is not altogether serious; she wants to "de provincialize " Nietzsche. But she fails in her attempts! Not that one is not looking to assign blame or even to imply causation between war and the philosopher! But if one hopes to understand things from a transnational perspective, as she says she hopes to to... She fails to come to terms with the importance of his ideas -- takes away Nietzsche's fangs, his role in broader historical projects. The book is decidedly provincial. She does not care about influence, or global movements, only about conversations. Conversations are not dangerous. Nietzsche is dangerous!
How is it that the Leopold-Loeb trial receives scant attention -- a few paragraphs. One would think it would occupy a much more central place in her narrative!?
Also, it's hard not to be at least a little bewildered by the contemporary tendency to appropriate and fawn over his aphorisms. In other words, I might hesitate before appropriating one of his admittedly brilliant aphorisms and hanging it in my parlor, considering the final destination of his superman; for what slowly killed Nietzsche clearly did not make him stronger. For all his sheer and spectacular brilliance, this was a man clearly very sick; his contempt for the human condition, and for anything approaching weakness, is more than a little chilling. He illuminates and makes stark some fundamental questions about the individual, value, and states of belonging. But a more thoroughgoing contempt for human existence is not readily found -- perhaps even more nihilistic than some of Dostoevsky's narrators...
As an aside, it's hard not to be a little bewildered at the appropriation of Nietzsche by so many different and politically opposed groups, but his feverish and brilliant ramblings must attract the attention of any intelligent mind that detects tension in the world or in his/her life. Perhaps his celebrity is only a bit more bewildering than the celebrity of say, Elvis. The creation of the celebrity is really what this book is about. It's cultural/intellectual history.
Things do get a little more serious in chapter 5, perhaps the most impressive and serious bit of the book. But one gets the impression that when she writes about Walter Kaufmann, she is really writing about herself. Her attempts to distance herself from Kaufmann are inadequate; she more or less adopts his view. Her obligatory dance with Adorno is not altogether serious; she wants to "de provincialize " Nietzsche. But she fails in her attempts! Not that one is not looking to assign blame or even to imply causation between war and the philosopher! But if one hopes to understand things from a transnational perspective, as she says she hopes to to... She fails to come to terms with the importance of his ideas -- takes away Nietzsche's fangs, his role in broader historical projects. The book is decidedly provincial. She does not care about influence, or global movements, only about conversations. Conversations are not dangerous. Nietzsche is dangerous!
How is it that the Leopold-Loeb trial receives scant attention -- a few paragraphs. One would think it would occupy a much more central place in her narrative!?
Also, it's hard not to be at least a little bewildered by the contemporary tendency to appropriate and fawn over his aphorisms. In other words, I might hesitate before appropriating one of his admittedly brilliant aphorisms and hanging it in my parlor, considering the final destination of his superman; for what slowly killed Nietzsche clearly did not make him stronger. For all his sheer and spectacular brilliance, this was a man clearly very sick; his contempt for the human condition, and for anything approaching weakness, is more than a little chilling. He illuminates and makes stark some fundamental questions about the individual, value, and states of belonging. But a more thoroughgoing contempt for human existence is not readily found -- perhaps even more nihilistic than some of Dostoevsky's narrators...
February 4, 2012
This is a book of great scholarship, which is written in a clear and direct manner. It is a book about reading. Nietzsche was a provocative writer, who provoked a great variety of responses from his readers. Ratner-Rosenhagen traces the responses of his American readers through the twentieth century. These readers did not simply absorb Nietzsche, but reacted to him in terms of their own preoccupations. By tracing these reactions through the century Ratner-Rosenhagen provides an intellectual history rather than an interpretation of Nietzsche. Having been interested in Nietzsche and certain reactions to him, I was eager to read this book. As I was unfamiliar with many of the people she describes it took some effort to keep up with her. Her arguements are complex and subtle. This would be a great book to use in a course in intellectual history, where students could discuss her arguements and read some of the authors she cites. Nonetheless I feel much richer for having read it.
September 17, 2012
American Nietzsche is neither a biography nor a formal analysis of philosophical concepts. Professor Ratner-Rosenhagen is a historian, and the subject of her book is presented through the lens of her discipline. It is, in short, an insightful and skillfully written treatment of the influence of Friedrich Nietzsche's ideas and image on American culture. Refreshingly, I detected no axes being ground, no hidden agendas skulking in the shadows. The author has simply identified an important story that needed to be told, and has done so in a thorough, well-organized, and interesting manner. Whatever your level of familiarity with Nietzsche the person or his work, or your opinions about either, if you have an interest in the events, ideas, and people that shaped 20th century American culture then you will very likely find this book engaging. [This review was previously posted at Amazon.com on 28 January 2012.]
April 24, 2024
Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen has managed to fit a detailed description of a hundred years of Nietzsche's philosophy being used in America, from when his works were first exported to fin de siècle America to the turn of the 20th century, into a few hundred pages. While the book is suited to a graduate-level student with some background knowledge of various schools of philosophy (existentialism, romanticism, pragmatism, etc.), the writing is never too difficult to follow. And despite her pointing out that there are so many different interpretations of Nietzsche's work over the past century, she never says that a specific interpretation is right or wrong, but instead leaves the reader the chance to decide for themselves, which is a very Nietzschean ethos.
A topic that I've been researching and writing about is the way that Christians have responded to Nietzsche's blistering critiques of Christian thought and morality, and this book does not disappoint in documenting the wide range of different reactions that Christian thinkers over the years had to him. It turns out that in early 20th-century America, conservative Protestant theologians and Catholic theologians used Nietzsche to criticize liberal Protestantism well, because Nietzsche pointed out the difficulties of trying to integrate modernity with Christianity. Ratner-Rosenhagen also discusses how the "death of God theology" of the 1960s was heavily influenced by Nietzsche's works. So Christians usually either repudiated Nietzsche's works or used his works to criticize liberal Protestants (liberal in the Enlightenment sense, not the political sense).
This book is divided into six chapters. The first chapter is about how Nietzsche's work first came to America and how it was received in the 1910s, by a variety of different groups: socialists, feminists, atheists, and radicals of all stripes. It discussed how he was seen as a German aristocratic thinker in contrast to American democratic ways of living. The book also discusses Ralph Waldo Emerson and his impact on Nietzsche a lot, as Emerson was seen as the American Nietzsche, who came up with ideas on pragmatism and individualism decades before Nietzsche did.
Chapter 2 is where all the early Christian critiques of Nietzsche are stored. Theologically orthodox Protestants and Catholics used his work to criticize liberal Protestants, as they felt like Nietzsche's critique of Christianity was actually just a critique of liberalism. Of course, after Vatican II, the Catholic Church did accept many liberal ideas, but at the time it was very critical of liberalism. Some of the arguments made by Catholics were very "Against David Frenchism"-esque. And for Protestants, this was when the fundamentalist-modernist controversy was in its infancy, so some of Nietzsche's critiques hit the modernist camp pretty hard.
Chapter 3 dedicates itself to exploring the concept of the Ubermensch as found in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. There are two main interpretations: the Ubermensch as overcoming of the self, which was preferred by socialists and other collectivists, and the Ubermensch as overcoming others, which was preferred by aristocrats and the Nazis. There was also a lot of discussion on how American and German philosophers and readers saw each other differently. There's a sense that Americans are too democratic and individualistic for Nietzsche's philosophy.
Chapter 4 discusses how various radicals of the early 20th century America used his works to educate themselves. Many American intellectuals thought that America's philosophy was inferior and that Continental philosophy was much more superior, especially intellectuals that were outside academia. Many compared Nietzsche to Hamlet and to other philosophers like William James and John Dewey.
Then there is an interlude where bits and pieces of various letters written to Nietzsche's sister were shown. These letters allow the reader to see how ordinary people interpreted his philosophy, as opposed to all the famous thinkers mentioned in the various other chapters of the book. This was a brilliant addition to an already brilliant book.
Chapter 5 moves to how Walter Kaufmann single-handedly brought Nietzsche back after his reputation was ruined because Germans had used his work to inspire both world wars. Kaufmann painted Nietzsche as a Dionysian product of the Enlightenment and an existentialist. There's a lot of comparison between Anglo-American positivism versus European existentialism. Then there's Death of God theology with famous theologians like Tillich, Barth, and Bonhoeffer all using his work. Jews also were inspired by the idea of the death of God, as Jews too had gone through the earth-shattering event of the Holocaust.
Chapter 6 is a lot more academic and focuses on the back end of the 20th century, discussing Derrida and Foucault and his impact on deconstruction, post-structuralism, and postmodernism. Various intellectuals' opinions on Nietzsche are discussed, such of that of Allan Bloom bemoaning moral relativism on American campuses, Harold Bloom embracing such relativism in the pursuit of great art and his similarities to Emerson, Richard Rorty discussing the links between pragmatists such as John Dewey and William James, and Stanley Cavell talking about how Nietzsche challenged the very foundations of philosophy itself and what it was for. The book ends with an epilogue about Allan Bloom.
As Nietzsche's work is now more relevant than ever in the decade after this book was published, I would like to see an updated version. For now, this book is a great guide on how Americans viewed Nietzsche's philosophy from 1900 to 2010.
A topic that I've been researching and writing about is the way that Christians have responded to Nietzsche's blistering critiques of Christian thought and morality, and this book does not disappoint in documenting the wide range of different reactions that Christian thinkers over the years had to him. It turns out that in early 20th-century America, conservative Protestant theologians and Catholic theologians used Nietzsche to criticize liberal Protestantism well, because Nietzsche pointed out the difficulties of trying to integrate modernity with Christianity. Ratner-Rosenhagen also discusses how the "death of God theology" of the 1960s was heavily influenced by Nietzsche's works. So Christians usually either repudiated Nietzsche's works or used his works to criticize liberal Protestants (liberal in the Enlightenment sense, not the political sense).
This book is divided into six chapters. The first chapter is about how Nietzsche's work first came to America and how it was received in the 1910s, by a variety of different groups: socialists, feminists, atheists, and radicals of all stripes. It discussed how he was seen as a German aristocratic thinker in contrast to American democratic ways of living. The book also discusses Ralph Waldo Emerson and his impact on Nietzsche a lot, as Emerson was seen as the American Nietzsche, who came up with ideas on pragmatism and individualism decades before Nietzsche did.
Chapter 2 is where all the early Christian critiques of Nietzsche are stored. Theologically orthodox Protestants and Catholics used his work to criticize liberal Protestants, as they felt like Nietzsche's critique of Christianity was actually just a critique of liberalism. Of course, after Vatican II, the Catholic Church did accept many liberal ideas, but at the time it was very critical of liberalism. Some of the arguments made by Catholics were very "Against David Frenchism"-esque. And for Protestants, this was when the fundamentalist-modernist controversy was in its infancy, so some of Nietzsche's critiques hit the modernist camp pretty hard.
Chapter 3 dedicates itself to exploring the concept of the Ubermensch as found in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. There are two main interpretations: the Ubermensch as overcoming of the self, which was preferred by socialists and other collectivists, and the Ubermensch as overcoming others, which was preferred by aristocrats and the Nazis. There was also a lot of discussion on how American and German philosophers and readers saw each other differently. There's a sense that Americans are too democratic and individualistic for Nietzsche's philosophy.
Chapter 4 discusses how various radicals of the early 20th century America used his works to educate themselves. Many American intellectuals thought that America's philosophy was inferior and that Continental philosophy was much more superior, especially intellectuals that were outside academia. Many compared Nietzsche to Hamlet and to other philosophers like William James and John Dewey.
Then there is an interlude where bits and pieces of various letters written to Nietzsche's sister were shown. These letters allow the reader to see how ordinary people interpreted his philosophy, as opposed to all the famous thinkers mentioned in the various other chapters of the book. This was a brilliant addition to an already brilliant book.
Chapter 5 moves to how Walter Kaufmann single-handedly brought Nietzsche back after his reputation was ruined because Germans had used his work to inspire both world wars. Kaufmann painted Nietzsche as a Dionysian product of the Enlightenment and an existentialist. There's a lot of comparison between Anglo-American positivism versus European existentialism. Then there's Death of God theology with famous theologians like Tillich, Barth, and Bonhoeffer all using his work. Jews also were inspired by the idea of the death of God, as Jews too had gone through the earth-shattering event of the Holocaust.
Chapter 6 is a lot more academic and focuses on the back end of the 20th century, discussing Derrida and Foucault and his impact on deconstruction, post-structuralism, and postmodernism. Various intellectuals' opinions on Nietzsche are discussed, such of that of Allan Bloom bemoaning moral relativism on American campuses, Harold Bloom embracing such relativism in the pursuit of great art and his similarities to Emerson, Richard Rorty discussing the links between pragmatists such as John Dewey and William James, and Stanley Cavell talking about how Nietzsche challenged the very foundations of philosophy itself and what it was for. The book ends with an epilogue about Allan Bloom.
As Nietzsche's work is now more relevant than ever in the decade after this book was published, I would like to see an updated version. For now, this book is a great guide on how Americans viewed Nietzsche's philosophy from 1900 to 2010.
Want to read
November 4, 2011Review (The Nation): http://bit.ly/vBdrGj
"With vigor and intelligence American Nietzsche covers a great deal of ground—more than a century of response to the philosopher, from music critic James Huneker and philosopher Josiah Royce to feminist writers Eve Sedgwick and Judith Butler. The book concludes with a consideration of how three influential thinkers—Harold Bloom, Richard Rorty and Stanley Cavell—relied on Nietzsche as a way to recover “expressions of antifoundationalism on American native grounds.”
"With vigor and intelligence American Nietzsche covers a great deal of ground—more than a century of response to the philosopher, from music critic James Huneker and philosopher Josiah Royce to feminist writers Eve Sedgwick and Judith Butler. The book concludes with a consideration of how three influential thinkers—Harold Bloom, Richard Rorty and Stanley Cavell—relied on Nietzsche as a way to recover “expressions of antifoundationalism on American native grounds.”
July 15, 2021
The text runs through page 312, and I still need to read pages 290 to 305.
It's quite remarkable, an intellectual history of how Nietzsche's ideas were received that manages to include consideration, interpretation, and application from Emma Goldman, H. L. Mencken, Judith Butler, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, two Blooms (Harold and Allan but no Leopold), Richard Rorty, Lionel Trilling, and, of course, Walter Kaufmann.
The book is packed, and many others appear--including lesser known academics as well as "regular" Americans writing letters to Nietzsche's sister, often ethnic Germans in search of a connection to the philosopher.
I would describe the book as highly readable, particularly considering that it's an academic text.
It's quite remarkable, an intellectual history of how Nietzsche's ideas were received that manages to include consideration, interpretation, and application from Emma Goldman, H. L. Mencken, Judith Butler, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, two Blooms (Harold and Allan but no Leopold), Richard Rorty, Lionel Trilling, and, of course, Walter Kaufmann.
The book is packed, and many others appear--including lesser known academics as well as "regular" Americans writing letters to Nietzsche's sister, often ethnic Germans in search of a connection to the philosopher.
I would describe the book as highly readable, particularly considering that it's an academic text.
May 20, 2017
There are already plenty of thorough (and maybe too thorough) reviews on here for this, but I'd add that (unfortunately) it isn't a cultural history but strictly an intellectual one. So you get weird instances of Judith Butler making an appearance, but Barbara Stanwyck's Baby Face (1933) and Hitchcock's Rope (1948) are absent—probably the two most popular cinematic expositions of anything vaguely Nietzschean in America—as are poets (Stevens), novelists (Jack London, Richard Wright), playwrights (O'Neill). As for what Ratner-Rosenhagen actually handles, it's largely informative, not critical—another lost opportunity.
March 9, 2018
This was an introduction to Nietzsche for me. I have no background in philosophy so I found it a bit of a challenge to get through.
September 24, 2021
Anti foundationalism, the death of God, finding universal truth. The philosopher with a hammer. German thinker. Thus spoke Zarathustra. Ecce homo. Establishing a foothold on moral values.
November 28, 2012
This book adverts to being a reader-response account of the Nietzsche reception in the US. And at first, this is what it actually is -- and it is fascinating, and potentially a mind-blowing new understanding of intellectual history, which the popular and personal responses to complex ideas. Why Nietzsche has exercised such deep fascination and engagement among popular readers, far more than any other serious philosopher, is a crucial and probing question. In particular, why has Nietzsche exercised such power over a certain kind of reader: not to put too fine a point on it, but particularly on self-involved young men? If R-R had asked and answered this question, as she suggests in her introduction that she intended to, she would have written an original and potentially landmark book.
Alas, about 70 pages in, it switches into what is quite a standard sort of reception-history, focused entirely on the various ways in which American intellectuals have read and responded to Nietzsche. Here the book is useful, but far less original than it might have been. In this phase it is also plagued by a refusal to actually assess Nietzsche's ideas critically, and instead succumbs to the silliest of intellectual history fashions, which is to engage in a he-said/she-said account of various readings of the subject, in this case Nietzsche, and why these particular readings took place at the particular times and places where they did. As such, it's somewhat useful, but not nearly as useful as a more critically engaged reading that asked whether certain readings were actually "better" than others -- which would have actually required wrestling at a profound level with Nietzsche's ideas about the quality of ideas. Such a critical engagement with the various readings of Nietzsche was apparently beyond the author's imagination, and this instead we get a one-damn-reading-after-another account of the various ways in which other American high-brows have understood and used Nietzsche.
A missed opportunity.
Alas, about 70 pages in, it switches into what is quite a standard sort of reception-history, focused entirely on the various ways in which American intellectuals have read and responded to Nietzsche. Here the book is useful, but far less original than it might have been. In this phase it is also plagued by a refusal to actually assess Nietzsche's ideas critically, and instead succumbs to the silliest of intellectual history fashions, which is to engage in a he-said/she-said account of various readings of the subject, in this case Nietzsche, and why these particular readings took place at the particular times and places where they did. As such, it's somewhat useful, but not nearly as useful as a more critically engaged reading that asked whether certain readings were actually "better" than others -- which would have actually required wrestling at a profound level with Nietzsche's ideas about the quality of ideas. Such a critical engagement with the various readings of Nietzsche was apparently beyond the author's imagination, and this instead we get a one-damn-reading-after-another account of the various ways in which other American high-brows have understood and used Nietzsche.
A missed opportunity.
Want to read
February 6, 2012Heard about it on The New York Times Books Podcast. I knew I just had to read it. How a country could have been so receptive to a thinker so antagonistic to the values the country held dear deserves some attention.
May 17, 2012
This author is definitely an academic so this is no easy or fast read but surely worthwhile for any Nietzsche fans who are interested in tracing the history of America's take on the reputation and standing of one of the truly great modern thinkers of the western world.
May 30, 2016
Hard read but worthwhile to help one understand how culture went from Christian to secular. Some say Nietzsche released them from dead Christianity. Christianity is still alive and Nietzsche is dead. He has been the ruination of many intellectuals and mainline denominations.
May 31, 2012
For my full review see the link below:
http://ibidnote.blogspot.com/2012/05/...
http://ibidnote.blogspot.com/2012/05/...
December 16, 2013
I quit in this. it wasn't what I thought it would be, and I found it tough going. maybe someday I will go back to it
January 24, 2013
I enjoyed this rather well. There was a lot I didn't know about the American Nietzsche. I would recommend this book.
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