American Nietzsche by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen is a work in both the history of American thought and political philosophy. The book is a compendium of fascinating research into subtle details of Nietzsche’s life and writings in relation to modern America. While she recounts the first doctoral student to have read Nietzsche, Wilbur Urban in 1897 in Jena, and documents the dialogue many intellectuals had with Nietzsche (from Walter Kaufmann to Harold Bloom and Judith Butler), she also relates how Nietzsche entered into the public imagination. Everyone from anarchists to conservatives, from authors such as Kahil Gibras (The Prophet) to literary radicals found a touch stone in his work.
Like many an historian however, Ratner-Rosenhagen’s record of the American engagement with Nietzsche over the last century includes an indirectly conveyed philosophical teaching. She sides with Nietzsche’s notion of a “critical history for life.” In On the Use and Abuse of History for Life, Nietzsche cautions against a monumental and antiquarian approach to the past. The first elevates heroes before whom a nation might bow; the second approach is so disengaged from tradition as to render it a sterile object of, at best, idle curiosity. But “a critical history for life” consists of critically engaging the past in order to free the reader to think creatively about themselves in the present. With respect to American Nietzsche, the same approach to history entails founding foundations rather than, for instance, searching for principles in a glorified heritage. Ratner-Rosenhagen writes: “This is not a history of American “Nietzscheans.' It is a history of American readers making their way to their views of themselves and their modern America by thinking through, against, and around Nietzsche's stark challenges . . . It is a story about his crucial role in the ever dynamic remaking of modern American thought” (p. 27). Nietzsche’s role in the dynamic remaking of American thought consists of tearing down foundations in order to rebuild them as founding moments. Principles of liberty and equality are not ensconced in the traditions of the “old world” or in pristine and abstract ideas of Enlightenment philosophers (as she suggests is the case for Allan Bloom); they are manifest in our everyday and concrete relations with each other.
By engaging Nietzsche over the course of a century the Americans have been rediscovering what makes them tick. But if Nietzsche is a reminder of what lies at the root of western culture, then surely there must be someone who more than any other captures the authentic spirit of the new world. For Ratner-Rosenhagen, this would be Ralph Waldo Emerson and his question, “How shall I live?” Nietzsche’s echoing Emerson’s words at the outset of The Genealogy of Morals is not a coincidence. She explains that Nietzsche discovered Emerson at a critical turning point in his development: During a crisis of faith in 1862, Emerson pointed him in the direction he would follow for the rest of his life. She continues, “It was Emerson who first instructed Nietzsche about the joys and terrors of the intellectual life without firm land between one's feet, of life on the open waters of indeterminacy without compass or guide” (p. 15). She points out that while Nietzsche turned against Wagner, Schopenhauer, Goethe, Kant and Plato, he never “slew” Emerson (p. 15). On the contrary, he was Nietzsche’s life-long companion for twenty-six years, Nietzsche's first philosophical love (p. 311), and educator (p. 312). The similarities with Emerson's thought that Ratner-Rosenhagen meticulously maps indicate that Nietzsche is a German-Emerson. And the American, who reads Nietzsche and remembers Emerson, is an American Nietzsche.
Although the affinity Nietzsche’s thought could have for the new world seems at first highly unlikely, especially given Allan Bloom’s argument that his alleged moral relativism is responsible for the demise of democracy, Ratner-Rosenhagen makes a convincing argument to the contrary. She points out that like the United States, which had become culturally estranged from Europe, Nietzsche was largely rejected by the European intellectual establishment, at least at first. Nietzsche attacked the tradition in order to liberate thought and life; the United States had turned against Britain and was confronted with human existence as a task as well. Just as his philosophy culminates in laughter, song and dance, she reports that Nietzsche admired, somewhat romantically, the innocence of the United States, and said that he wanted to laugh like an American. Both Nietzsche and the Americans understand that necessity is a limit that thought can master. Both love freedom. When Nietzsche received a letter of admiration from the American violinist Gustav Dannreuther while writing The Gay Science; a letter from a musician expressing the hope of possessing a likeness to Nietzsche, she points out that Dannreuther’s letter “came from the land of Ralph Waldo Emerson”, and that the title of Nietzsche’s book was homage to Emerson (pp. 2-5). At a philosophical (Emerson) and socio-cultural level, the outcast of Europe finds a home in a land whose spirit he shared—but of course and in keeping with the latter, he is also one of the most extreme critics of democracy.
Ratner-Rosenhagen treats Nietzsche as a partner in the formation of a vibrant, pluralist and democratic culture. Published in 2012, her book coincides with the silver anniversary of Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, but is not juxtaposed to his thesis. Instead, she argues that Bloom’s ressentiment and intellectual belatedness provoke students to “shoot arrows of longing” beyond him and any abyss of anti-foundationalism (p. 312). Her book might be read as reviving a dispute with Bloom, voiced years earlier by Stanley Cavell. But American Nietzsche might also to be read as a response to 21st century challenges, and as a teaching about what ought to be done from his and Emerson’s perspective.
