The Plastic Nietzsche, Part VII: The Final Entry In My Serial Review of Ratner-Rosenhagen's American Nietzsche

Prior Entries: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V, and Part VI.

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Walter Kaufmann is a key figure in American Nietzsche. Other reviewers have taken note, and I concur that Ratner-Rosenhagen's analysis of that translator and promoter of Nietzsche's thought deserves praise. In this final entry of my series I return to him in order to reflect on a brief but noteworthy section of the book. That section goes to the paradoxical core of why Nietzsche is both valuable and problematic for philosophers and deep thinkers of all stripes. Along with the Interlude, this portion of the book also helps explain his relevance to the thinking realms of a democratic culture. Taken together these two parts of the book constitute the heart and soul of American Nietzsche.

Several immigrant and émigré Nietzsches existed in American thought before Kaufmann's work became prominent. Ratner-Rosenhagen provides rudimentary outlines of versions celebrated by Leo Strauss, Hannah Arendt, Paul Tillich, and especially Theodor Adorno (pp. 226-233). But it was Kaufmann's Nietzsche that would capture the imagination of American thinkers. In Ratner-Rosenhagen's hands, Kaufmann's Nietzsche is the Enlightenment's "problem thinker" and "serious philosopher" who expressed himself---and this is key---in aphorisms. Nietzsche becomes the philosopher who had lost his "faith in mankind" and some "optimism" but "still shared the Enlightenment belief in man." To Kaufmann the latter expressed itself in a "reasoned philosophy of 'self-perfection'" that reconciled the sometimes contradictory claims of Nietzsche's aphorisms (p. 234). The Interlude demonstrated how Nietzsche connected to readers in a democracy, but his aphorisms explain the accessible, democratic nature of his philosophy. The "aphoristic style," then, is both the problem and the key to understanding Nietzsche the philosopher.

But what are "aphorisms"? According to the Merriam Webster online dictionary, they are "concise statement[s] of a principle" or "terse formulation[s] of a truth or sentiment," an "adage." The following entry from the Concise Encyclopedia is located on that same webpage. Aphorisms are (bolds mine): "Terse formulation of any generally accepted truth or sentiment conveyed in a pithy, memorable statement. The term was first used in the Aphorisms of Hippocrates, a long series of propositions concerning disease and the art of healing. Aphorisms were used especially in dealing with subjects for which principles and methodology developed relatively late, including art, agriculture, medicine, jurisprudence, and politics, but in the modern era they have usually been vehicles of wit and pithy wisdom. Celebrated modern aphorists include Friedrich Nietzsche and Oscar Wilde."

The term 'aphorism' arises seven times in the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, in entries for "Francis Bacon," "Literary Forms of Medieval Philosophy," "Spinoza's Physical Theory," "Metaphor," etc. The most substantive treatment is in the entry on "Literary Forms of Medieval Philosophy." Here are some excerpts (bolds mine):

- "This form is not terribly common in the medieval period. Two works worthy of mention are Al-Farabi's political aphorisms and a text attributed to Hermes Trimegistus...called The Book of Twenty-Four Philosophers. This text consists of twenty-four definitions of God...Al-Farabi's work, known as 'Selected Aphorisms' gets this title from its opening lines, in which Al-Farabi says the work consists of selected aphorisms from the ancients (Plato and Aristotle) 'concerning that by which cities ought to be governed and made prosperous...' (Butterworth, 2001, 5-6)."
- "The aphoristic form seems to raise some of the same questions about possible esoteric motivations as does the allegorical form. In the case of The Book of the Twenty-Four Philosophers the form seems to derive from the inaccessibility of the divine nature to human intellection."
- "In genre some medieval works fall somewhere between aphorism and axiom, most significantly works connected to the important and influential Liber de causis. The Liber circulated as a work of Aristotle under the title Liber Aristotelis de expositione bonitatis purae until the 13th century when Thomas Aquinas found its source in Proclus's Elements of Theology....The work seems to present its principles as axioms, but the principles and their explanation/derivation is not really demonstrative and the principles themselves are highly abstract Neoplatonic metaphysical principles that are sometimes as paradoxical as they are self-evident." 

So when you read Nietzsche you find an ancient form of philosophy where axioms, or adages, are expressed with brevity, or conciseness. But the form also raises questions about "esoteric motivations" and the demonstrability of the given aphorism. The form makes the principle presented feel like Biblical wisdom, but the principle may also feel self-evident, paradoxical, or just inscrutable upon further exploration. The aphorism presents Nietzsche and his philosophy as both trustworthy and mysterious. This likely buttressed the feelings of those already attracted to Nietzsche's exoticism. The thing to remember, however, is that Nietzsche's form derived from a long, if troublesome, tradition in philosophy.

Returning to American Nietzsche, in her discussion of Kaufmann's re-presentation of Nietzsche's works Ratner-Rosenhagen makes an important observation. While Nietzsche disdained writers who put style over substance---"literary decadence" he called it---his own philosophical writings were based on "lightning strike" aphorisms and what appear to be "flashes of insight" (p. 234). So not only were his aphorisms a potential problem as a philosophical presentation, but Nietzsche contradicted himself in relation to his own style. The crafty Kaufmann, however, used Nietzsche's own criticism "to inoculate" the latter "against the very charge" of "literary decadence" (pp. 234-235). In the following extended passage, Ratner-Rosenhagen uses Kaufmann's own 1950 work, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, to shed light on Kaufmann's maneuvers (bolds mine):

Kaufmann defended Nietzsche's use of aphorism by arguing that it was the necessary means for him to radically revise both the mode and the purpose of philosophical inquiry. He argued that aphorisms were crucial to Nietzsche's pluralistic project, for they let him come at the question of life from as many different angles as possible. In addition, [Kaufmann] argued that Nietzsche's aphorisms served as thought experiments, provisional hypotheses to test new visions of the good life in a contingent universe. He characterized both Nietzsche's theory of knowledge and the form he used to express it by introducing the terms experimental and existential. By this, Kaufmann meant that questions about truth, beliefs, and nature are valuable only insofar as they are relevant to one's way of life. For Nietzsche, philosophy is [in Kaufmann's words] 'not a finished and impersonal system, but a passionate quest for knowledge, an unceasing series of courageous experiments.' ...For Kaufmann, Nietzsche's existentialism is best understood when we consider him to be a 'problem-thinker', not a 'system-thinker', and that his use of aphorism was his way of 'living through each problem.' By insisting that aphorism is not an abandonment but a realization of the serious inquiry into the problems of living...Kaufmann connected the dots: 'Life does indeed reside in the whole of Nietzsche's thinking and writing, and there is a unity which is obscured, but not obliterated, by the apparent discontinuity of his experimentalism.' (pp. 235-236).

This passage raises many tough, perhaps unanswerable, questions: What did Kaufmann mean exactly by "the question of life"? Is the phrase "pluralistic project" anachronistic (i.e. presentist) in relation to Nietzsche---a relic of Kaufmann's own thought project? Is Kaufmann's existential vision of Nietzsche also anachronistic, or are the unifying threads real? At what point does a Nietzschean "thought experiment" turn into a verifiable, demonstrable axiom to contributes to a new vision of the good? When does it become a Nico-Nietzschean Ethic, if you will? To Kaufmann it never will. Based on Kaufmann's description of Nietzsche as the uber-practitioner of an "experimental...philosophy of life" (p. 236), was Nietzsche more of a non-systematic, anti-formal proto-pragmatist than proto-existentialist?* Do aphorisms crush logic while exemplifying an alternate reality-based rationality?

Despite the seriousness of these questions, if one can set them aside temporarily, the appeal of aphorisms is obvious. They are an accessible, democratic way of philosophizing. They provide people not trained in formal philosophy with an entry point into the game of "serious inquiry into the problems of living." Aphorisms enable one to be antifoundational and anti-systematic without being anti-philosophical. Nietzsche's aphorisms allowed his thought to be inserted in different contexts and different times. Even if Kaufmann used Nietzsche's thought in ways that fit the former's existentialist program, Nietzsche himself also allowed for it. His "lightning strikes" could be inserted in many contexts. And because Nietzsche was concerned with the alienation of modernity, as well as with the historicism of moral and ethical systems, his aphorisms have been relevant to twentieth-century problems. The "aphoristic style" enabled plasticity, a variety of American Nietzsches.

Aphorisms are often provocations. Provocations inspire different thinking, diversity in thought: agreement can wait. There is, of course, much more to philosophy than mere provocation. But an appreciation of aphoristic provocation helps in understanding why Nietzsche has appealed to twentieth-century Americans. Democratic culture seeks to both foster and reconcile provocations. The Hegelian dialectic of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis captures a great part of that process. But that beginning point, the thesis, is almost always a provocation---either accidentally or purposefully. The enlightened autonomous difference maker is almost always going to provoke her/his friends and colleagues. And this is what made "Kaufmann's Nietzsche...an indispensable seer, critic, and educator" to his readers (p. 261).

This presentation of Nietzsche has its limitions. Ratner-Rosenhagen points this out in her own critique of Kaufmann's Nietzsche. The pursuit of a provocative, "Dionysian," authentic self-hood was, in Nietzsche, accompanied by a "repeated emphasis on the warring instincts" (p. 261). Kaufmann's Nietzsche was monistic, ahistorical, and apolitical, which contradicted Nietzsche's own emphasis on historical rootedness. Kaufmann emphasized "Nietzsche's intellectual self-sovereignty" above the rest of the thinker's themes (p. 261). Kaufmann's Nietzsche sold, at least among thoughtful Americans in the 1950s and 1960s. But it undersold Nietzsche's complexity and contradictions. The provocative, aphoristic Ubermensch---a Nietzsche confused with the partial explication of his philosophy---captured the imaginations among the fearful. This was the seductive, roguish Nietzsche I met at the University of Missouri in the early 1990s.

Indeed, as I reassess the three Nietzsches I knew before reading this book---the Crusade, Rogue, and Academic Nietzsches---I see fully how and why these iterations came into being. My misapprehensions and misunderstandings have been corrected and contextualized. More importantly, I now know why I encountered them. I would now go as far as to assert that all academics, and all those who care about the humanities, should develop a deeper understanding of Nietzsche's plasticity, permanent relevance, and philosophical assertions. There is a reason why Nietzsche remains canonical.

As for American Nietzsche's place in the canon of American history, it would be premature to say anything authoritative. But I will most certainly hazard a highly enthusiastic limited affirmation: Ratner-Rosenhagen has authored an indispensable work of cultural and intellectual history.  It is also eminently readable. Up to this point I have not praised her writing style, but this is a lyrical, stylish work. She's not a Louis Menand nor Jackson Lears, but that is no insult. Lears' Rebirth of a Nation is one of the most literary cultural-intellectual histories I've read in years. Comparatively, I am still pleased to have spent so much time with American Nietzsche. If your knowledge of Nietsche heretofore is superficial, after reading American Nietzsche you'll know as much as---nay probably more than---the Nietzsche poseurs and Evangelical critics. You'll also fully understand the enthusiasm of late twentieth-century academics. Finally, if you let her, Ratner-Rosenhagen will show you something important about Nietzsche's place in the American intellectual tradition---about how Nietzsche inspired problem thinkers in a pluralistic democracy.

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*Ratner-Rosenhagen asserts that if there were strong parallels between pragmatism and Nietzschean socio-cultural criticism, it was Nietzsche who provided an "animating image of the good life" in a way that "instrumentalism alone" could not. She continued: "The notions of provisional truth and situational ethics were useful strategies for dealing with the mechanics of living, but what they [Nietzscheans] desired above all else was a 'prophetic vision' of human existence that was both inspirational and terrifying, sublime and haunting" (p. 189).

Review: Ramsey on Self's *All in the Family*

All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy since the 1960s.  Robert Self.  (New York:    Hill and Wang, 2012. pp. Vii, 518, photographs, bibliography, notes, index.  Cloth $30.00).

Reviewed by Chris Ramsey

Robert Self's new monograph is an ambitious attempt to interweave the histories of postwar liberalism, conservatism, gender, and sexuality from the Lyndon Johnson administration to the present day.  Self argues that white, patriarchal assumptions about the postwar family headed and provided for by husbands dictated the nature of the programs of the Great Society, an ethos he terms “breadwinner liberalism.”  The numerous social movements of the late 1960s, including the New Left, the antiwar movement, black power, gay rights, and feminism all “challenged the liberal version of the idealized nuclear family by demanding rights not imagined by existing legal and political institutions” (5).  While all these movements scored notable victories by the mid 1970s, particularly in the realm of privacy, their efforts to provide alternatives to the dominant social norm of the lone male provider galvanized an anti-feminist, conservative resistance that saw the sanctity of the family – and the nation's morality – as under siege.  Over the course of the 1970s and 1980s, the New Right created a more exclusive definition of the male breadwinner ideal, one buttressed by traditional conservative principles of free market ideology, fundamentalist Christianity, martial readiness, and heterosexuality.  Self presents a stimulating, but also convincing, thesis through meticulous research, nuanced analysis, and clean prose. By incorporating gender and sexuality with the traditional political and economic narratives of the modern United States history, All in the Familyis a welcome addition a growing body of scholarship that challenges the notion of the postwar conservative revival as a mere backlash to the social welfare state and civil rights. 

The first three chapters of All in the Family evaluate how the Left attacked the “core norms of masculinity” (8) that served as the basis for the model liberal father during the late 1960s.  The Johnson administration targeted young men for its antipoverty programs in order to groom them for a future of  household leadership based around an idealized form of white fatherhood.  Women academics and unionists criticized the state for not formally acknowledging the growing contributions of a wife's labor and wages to a family's sustenance.  Black power activists, most notably Huey Newton and Malcolm X, advocated for a more self-reliant black manhood and fatherhood instead of programs that chastised African-Americans for not modeling themselves after white families.  Conservatives used the struggle to define the American family between leftists and mainstream liberals to attack the welfare state, pointing to the Moynihan Report as proof that Johnson's policies encouraged a pathology of black male abandonment.  For proponents of breadwinner liberalism, military service as an important crucible for turning boys into responsible men, and Self notes that the Johnson administration revised draft standards to force a disproportionate amount of urban black men to fight in Vietnam (52).  Consequently,  antiwar activists sought to redefine American masculinity by elevating draft dodging to a civic duty that led to its own sexual award (“Girls say yes to boys who say no”).  Self also describes how gay men challenged the breadwinner ideal by protesting the notion that heterosexuality was a prerequisite to citizenship and respectability, through the courts, their own print culture, and the public sphere (the Stonewall Rebellion). 

           

Self rightfully points out that breadwinner liberalism rested on prescribed women's roles,  social standards that idolized domesticity at the expense of educational attainment or careers.  Although race, class, ideology, and sexual preference kept the feminist movement splintered, Self states that the movement successfully “advanced women's position in the marketplace” (106).  Unfortunately, the relative disunity, combined with conservative entrenchment, meant efforts to address the gross structural inequalities that plagued the poor and minority women failed.  In part two, Self uses the example of the women's movement to emphasize one of the book's critical themes: the debate over the meaning of the family and citizenship in the past four decades affirmed an individual's privacy and choice at the expense of socioeconomic parity. American courts upheld “negative rights,” particularly an individual's freedom from governmental restraint, yet these same legal institutions rarely addressed “positive rights,” which Self defines as using the government to guarantee that discriminated or disadvantaged groups can effectively exercise their personal liberties.  Self concretely elaborates on this line of thinking in the fifth chapter about reproduction politics.  While feminists successfully fight for the right for women to have legal abortion and greater control over their bodies, anti-feminist women and conservative politicians repeatedly check attempts to provide federal funding for abortion procedures.  Left to the dictates of the free market, only women who could pay for an abortion could actually use the legal protections afforded by Roe v. Wade. 

Self then describes the inability of the Democratic Party to synthesize the efforts by leftist social movements to formulate a more inclusive version of the liberal family.   As a result, while formerly marginalized groups on the Left – African Americans, women, homosexuals, and students – made their voice heard at the 1972 Democratic National Convention, the only thing held in common was ambivalence about McGovern's nomination.  Worse, the heightened visibility of these new constituencies alienated the Democratic Party's traditional base: white, male, blue collar, Catholic union workers, whose noticeable lack of enthusiasm contributed to McGovern's landslide defeat to Richard Nixon.  Well before the “Reagan Revolution,” Self argues that conservatives exploited the Democratic Party's new vulnerability on the family to devastating effect in the late 1960s and 1970s.   Evolving cultural mores that permitted men and women to openly express sexual pleasure outside of heterosexual marriage alarmed religious fundamentalists and right-wing voluntary associations such as the John Birch Society.  As early as 1968, the John Birch society launched a decency movement that sought to ban sex education in public schools on the basis that it interfered with “the family's moral responsibilities and rights...a government invasion of the private family sphere” (200).  The Nixon Administration's law and order mantra extended to the family, viewing the New Left, black power, gay men, lesbians, and feminists as emblematic of a deteroriating democracy that only could be corrected through a stricter upbringing that stressed faith and traditional values.

Self emphasizes that the transformation of “breadwinner liberalism” to “breadwinner conservatism” was not  only engineered from the top – the New Right would have been impossible without robust grassroots support.  The Equal Rights Amendment and the legality of abortion mobilized anti-feminist housewives across the nation to create organizations that pledged to defend traditional motherhood in order to save the family.  Several years before the prominence of the Moral Majority, groups such as Women Who Want to Be Women invoked Biblical justifications for upholding traditional gender roles and patriarchy.  Anti-feminist leaders, most notably Phyllis Schlafy, linked the “rights of parents” to the conservative principle of small government by accusing feminists of wasting tax payer money to ruin families (313).  Self argues the appeal of breadwinner conservatism transcended regions: even the Deep South re-calibrated their opposition to civil rights by appealing to patriotism, God, and the family instead of violent racial antipathy.  Self states that the growing ability of the Right to define the normative American family sealed the fate of liberalism in the Democratic Party by 1976: President Carter moved the party rightward by ignoring feminist demands, reducing government expenditures, and embracing neoliberal economic polices.  By the end of the decade, the emergence of national evangelical political activists such as Jerry Falwell and Oral Roberts, concerned that an expansive federal government limited their quest for patriarchal Godliness, spread the message of breadwinner conservatism through their congregations in mega churches, on radio airwaves, and on Christian television programs. 

The election of Ronald Reagan, if not a true revolution, placed feminists and other liberals on the defensive.  This limited the possibilities for political action on the left: American feminists spent much of the past three decades working to preserve the personal freedoms they won during 1960s and 1970s but largely abandoned efforts to expand the social safety net to allow for disadvantaged women to share in those freedoms.  Although the Right has not gotten everything they wanted – such as the Human Life Amendment – they successfully made many Americans scrutinize and question the necessity and extent of government services in every-day life through appeals to family values.  The virtuous white, Christian, family of the 1990s, led by a responsible, hard-working and dutiful father-provider, did not require nor desire government assistance, only privacy from an amoral secularist state whose meddling might squander their tax dollars on feminism, abortion, and obscene sexualities.  Self  points out the irony in the current ideal of breadwinner conservatism: the transition to a deregulated service-sector economy and growing socioeconomic inequality made such households nearly impossible for most Americans, but the aspiration to become such a family motivates many right-wing sympathizers living in the exurbs, the South, or the countryside.

Self addresses a wide breadth of topics in this book, chronicling how African Americans, feminists of all races and classes, gays, lesbians, antiwar activists, and grassroots conservative movements all competed to redefine the model American citizen and family.  Each of these topics are already responsible for extensive scholarship in their own right, and Self's ability to create a coherent central narrative incorporating all these movements over a forty year period is a testament to his skill.  Self's consistency in providing complex, nuanced evaluations of these variegated movements' struggle with breadwinner ideology constitutes the book's greatest strength, especially given the scope of his study.  For example, in the first chapter, Self points out that one of the proponents of breadwinner liberalism, Daniel Moynihan, and one of its notable critics, Malcolm X,  both called for black men to exercise greater influence and control over their households.  Likewise, Self's analysis of how both feminists and their opponents rely upon a vocabulary of “choice” and “privacy” to achieve their legal and social goals makes for compelling, thought-provoking reading.  Self is also commended for keeping his narrative focused on overarching thesis.  While the nature of his study lends itself to a dense book full of numerous organizations, political leaders, legal cases, and events, Self evaluates all of his myriad subjects' relationship to breadwinner liberalism (or in later chapters, breadwinner conservatism) at the end of each chapter. 

The book's shortcomings are minor.  At rate times, Self's terminology creates ambiguity.  For instance, Self argues that “ordinary women” contributed to the change in American sexual attitudes, a category he invokes multiple times throughout the chapter on the evolution of sexual culture, but he never clearly defines who an “ordinary woman” was in the late 1960s and early 1970s.  Furthermore, academic audiences might quibble with the book's broad focus: scholars who specialize in the history of feminism, civil rights, sexuality, liberalism, or conservatism might become frustrated  in the wayAll in the Family overlooks the research in the past twenty years that delineates all of these movements' deeper roots.[1]  In fact, any reader hoping for Self's take on relevant historiographical debates will be disappointed: there is no place in the book reserved for such a discussion.  Finally, despite the title, most of the book is dedicated to chronicling the evolution of the breadwinner ideal during the 1960s and 1970s;  readers more interested in post-Reagan developments may be disappointed. 

The publication of this book is timely and invites discussion on whether or not the recent presidential election represents a reversal of the trend Self identifies.  Barack Obama's re-election means a black family continues to serve as the First Family for the United States, and the critical and commercial success of shows such as Modern Familyrepresents a wider acceptance of “alternative” (inter-ethnic and gay) households.  Likewise, a new wave of successful of gay marriage referendums in Maine, Maryland, and Minnesota also undermines the breadwinner ideal that fueled the New Right and the center-right consensus.  All in the Familyprovides valuable historical context to help any reader, academic or not, to process and understand the ongoing evolution of the American family and its crucial place in the nation's political consciousness.

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[1]   A brief sampling of these wider historiographies on liberalism, feminism, and sexuality:  Thomas Sugrue, “Crabgrass-Roots Politics: Race, Rights, and the Reaction against Liberalism in the Urban North, 1940-1964,” Journal of American History Vol. 82 No. 2 (Sept. 1995): 551-578;  Chauncey, George. Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of a Gay Male World, 1890–1940(New York: Basic Books, 1994); Rupp, Leila and Taylor, Verta. Survival in the Doldrums: The American Women’s Rights Movement, 1945-1960 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).

Chris Ramsey is a Ph.D. candidate in United States History at Loyola University of Chicago.  His research interests focus on race, gender, and ethnicity in postwar urban America, and his dissertation (in progress) studies the evolution of white attitudes to racial attitudes on the Southwest Side of Chicago from the end of World War II through the election of Mayor Harold Washington in 1983.  He can be reached at cramsey1@luc.edu.

The Plastic Nietzsche, Part VI: A Serial Review of Ratner-Rosenhagen's American Nietzsche

Prior Entries: Part 1, Part II, Part III, Part IV, and Part V.

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Ratner-Rosenhagen's unnumbered chapter, the "Interlude" is, in my view, pivotal to understanding American Nietzsche. Even as a standalone entry it deserves high praise. Although reviewers of American Nietzsche have noted the Interlude's subject matter---Nietzsche's common American readers---in their commentaries, the former mostly focus on the book's recognizable intellectuals. None concentrate on the virtues of the Interlude itself. This is a shame. The chapter is most unusual, unique perhaps, in the historiography of intellectual history. How? It is rooted in---and made possible by---American fan letters from the Nietzsche Archive. The Interlude covers the 1910s and 1920s chronologically, and Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche is a key actor as both curator of Nietzsche's memory and keeper of fan mail.

The chapter serves as a kind of emotional history of the philosopher's ideas. The pitch of emotion is such that one could say that a sacramental vision of Nietzsche provides a grammar for the chapter. Through Förster-Nietzsche's scrupulous records we obtain a vision of readers' longings, of readers' ideas about ideas, of the range of readers' moral worlds, of Nietzsche as a celebrity, and of reader concerns about American modernity. Through the efforts of his fans, Nietzsche was, in Ratner-Rosenhagen's words, "a product of collaborative meaning-making between text and reader, text and context" (p. 199). His fans created the mythical Nietzsche. They sought relics of the man, particularly via his signature. His ideas and his person "possessed" the reader. The sacramental vision is apparent when Ratner-Rosenhagen argues that "virtually all letter writers confessed how their encounter with Nietzsche's philosophy either emboldened or chastened them, liberated them from old falsehoods,or saddled them with new moral responsibilities" (p. 203). The book also documents "religious devotion" to Nietzsche through their pilgrimages to the Nietzsche Archive and visits with Förster-Nietzsche (p. 209).

But the Interlude is crucial to Ratner-Rosenhagen's story, as I see it, in that it also unlocks and underscores a key topic in the book: democracy. In entries one and five of my ongoing review, I emphasized that American Nietzsche's importance derived, in large part, from how it helps us rethink democracy. The Interlude goes to this point. Its last section, titled "Pathos of Distance from Democratic Culture," the author begins by addressing the borders of that culture. She asserts that the two-way flow of ideas between Germany and the United States, via Nietzsche, demonstrates "the value of breaking down static concepts such as 'foreign thought,' 'organic ideas,' 'German theories,' and 'American worldviews'." The fan letters help "tell a bigger story about how the transnational traffic of Nietzsche's image and ideas helped puncture and rebuild, traverse and reconstitute intellectual borders" (p. 211).


Ratner-Rosenhagen then dives into a nuanced discussion of translation issues before returning to readers' desires and their cultural context. She argues that readers obtained from Nietzsche a "German pathos of distance." His philosophy helped readers "shield themselves from the crude, anti-intellectual mob mentality of American life" (p. 215). Ratner-Rosenhagen adds: "Just as we see variants of hero worship among professional intellectuals, so too do we see fears of American anti-intellectualism deeply burrowed into the imagination of general readers, who wrote to the archives" (p. 215). The author cites some particular letters as representative examples: two from Jennie Hintz (pp. 193-196), composed in 1913, and another from Theodore Van Derlyn (p. 215), composed in 1915. It is no coincidence that Ratner-Rosenhagen uses the Hintz and Van Derlyn letters to open and close the chapter, respectively.

Ratner-Rosenhagen lets us hear their voices through extended quotes precisely because those voices reflect crucial points from the author. Hintz's admiration for Nietzsche derived from a close reading of his works and H.L. Mencken, presumably The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. Her letter documented not only her devotion to Nietzsche's person and empathy for his past frailties, but her sense that Nietzsche had captured the alienation present in modern American life. Hintz had felt disconnected from modern life until Nietzsche's provocations shook her from her slumbers. She wrote Förster-Nietzsche because Hintz wanted help obtaining and distributing Nietzsche's works (in German, ironically---unless she only hoped to help fellow German immigrants). Through these works Americans would aspire to their highest selves.

Van Derlyn wrote Förster-Nietzsche to inform her that he was working on a manuscript about Nietzsche's work. Van Derlyn sought to "critique the mediocrity of man in the masses," to criticize "democratic" man in order to fight "the poverty of modern American cultural life" (p. 215). Like Matthew Arnold around fifty years earlier, who had critiqued the philistine men of business, Van Derlyn would use Nietzsche to work against America's monied plutocracy. To Van Derlyn this new ersatz American aristocracy was, unfortunately, "the recognized standard of...American society"; they were "the 'ultra-fashionable set'...[with] no sense, ...no soul, no reason, no character, nothing, except a peacock-like egocentricity, and above all, money, lots of money" (p. 215). Between the democratic man and the faux aristocrats, American culture---its democratic culture---was diseased. And Nietzsche, for Hintz and Van Derlyn, was the cure. Nietzsche, in Ratner-Rosenhagen's words, was "the timeless savior of modern humanity and a timely critic of a world out of kilter" (p. 215).

Other reviewers have noted the problem of democracy in relation to America's Nietzsche. For reader-admirers like Hintz and Van Derlyn, Nietzsche was, as Roger Bellin aptly argued, "deployed simultaneously in the service of antiauthoritarianism and a new 'democratic' aristocracy." As Thomas Meaney noted, however, this tactic was difficult for intellectuals. He wrote (italics mine): "For Rorty, for instance, the challenge Nietzsche posed for a democratic culture could be solved by simply signing on to everything he says about the self but quarantining the rest of his unpalatable anti-democratic pronouncements."

Alexander Star summed up the general reader's problem with a question: "How [would Nietzsche's admirers] separate his intoxicating attacks on convention from his disgust with democracy and its herd of citizens?" Posnock too addresses this problematic point when he underscores relationship between Nietzsche and radical left criticism of the American way of life: "Radical leftists—anarchists, socialists and feminists—were early enthusiasts...who found in Nietzsche’s contempt for religion and democracy a way to rouse the masses from obedience to Christian ideals of submission and democratic fictions of a free market." There's no way, in sum, to discuss the American Nietzsche without confronting the problems and perils of the idea behind the American project: democracy. This is what Ratner-Rosenhagen asks of us in this chapter, and it is a signal contribution of her project exploring the reception of Nietzsche in the United States.

The Interlude also underscores the plasticity of Nietzsche followers. As the author repeatedly proved and observed, readers "made and remade Nietzsche in their own image" (p. 216). They made him a "personalist companion, secular saint, or cultural critic," as their needs required. These readers were not, moreover, molded by Nietzsche, but rather were "active participants who collaborated with Nietzsche." In this process of making and unmaking, American citizen readers "reconstitute[d] national, political, and cultural distinctions" between America and Germany. This is the essence of transnationalism in relation to larger Western figures and ideas.

That this process, and this chapter and its themes, were critically important to Ratner-Rosenhagen is evident in the Interlude's final paragraph. Here she interjects her own voice in support of using these letters to extrapolate Nietzsche's broader significance "in the making of modern American thought." Here is her statement: "My belief is that [these letters speak] to the ways in which a variety of Americans both took part in and resisted the implications of transnational intellectual exchanges. ...Nietzsche [made]...the designation of 'average' no longer meaningful to his readers as a term of self-description. ...He showed them a pathos of distance from everyday values---whether of the church, the marketplace, or the civics lesson---that helped them sharpen their sense of distinction in themselves, enabling them to feel their own particularity." In Nietzsche they found "a philosophy that harmonized thinking and doing"; he was their "guide to becoming" (p. 217). Plasticity had to be inherent in his thought to guide a diverse group of people---a group whose diversity is fully evident in other chapters, even if those other chapters focus more on America's intellectual elite rather than the common reader.

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The seventh and final installment of this serial review will appear next week. - TL

The Plastic Nietzsche, Part V: A Serial Review of Ratner-Rosenhagen's American Nietzsche

Prior Entries: Part I, Part II, Part III, and Part IV.

After four installments wherein I evaluated the criticisms and praise of others in relation to American Nietzsche, I am now ready to hazard my own commentary, concerns, and questions.Today's entry deals with questions and criticism more than praise, but the latter will appear in my last entry. [Note: Minor editing corrections were made to this post 9:00 am CST]

In the first installment of this series I asserted that the book is "an indispensable companion for intellectual historians who need to think through their works' relationships to Nietzsche's life and writings." It was a sense I had immediately after my reading, and that feeling was confirmed, for the most part, by the other reviews. But this thesis is not a hard one to defend even without reference to the Nietzsche scholarship. How? Ratner-Rosenhagen's book is the first intellectual history to systematically work through the reception of Nietzsche among all types of thinking Americans. It's one of a kind.

Beyond that, however, I believe that future studies of Nietzsche will have to go through American Nietzsche for other reasons. I noted in my first entry that "our reception of Nietzsche, over various time periods, measures our receptiveness to the contradictions, problems, and possibilities of democracy." That last part is the key. Ratner-Rosenhagen is concerned with Nietzsche in relation to how democratic culture is structured and maintained in a modern world that occasionally needs interventions by authorities. This involves thinking about religion, philosophy, ethics, secularism, technology, popular culture, cultural life, diversity, how people identify with society, and, ultimately, how people relate to each other.  

Despite a review thesis that is not hard to defend, and perhaps overly laudatory, there are many questions one can ask in relation to the topics just enumerated. My first questions came up in relation to religion, in particular in relation to Catholicism and its status as a transnational entity.


For starters, what of Nietzsche by way of those Europeans whose writings were popular in America, people like G.K. Chesterton, who was highly critical of Nietzsche and Nietzscheans? Chesterton was the public enemy of George Bernard Shaw, a popularizer of the Ubermensch and directly referenced in American Nietzsche (pp. 112-113, 117). Along with Chesterton one might also look at the popularity of Hillaire Belloc or Etienne Gilson in relation to Nietzsche. As you can see, my point pertains particularly to Catholics, especially European Catholics who received attention in the United States from both conservative/traditionalist and liberal wings of the faith. The popular figures I mention above could have been addressed in chapter two, where Catholics are already covered (pp.80-87). In those passages Ratner-Rosenhagen focuses on Maude D. Petre (who used Nietzsche positivelyl), but also eventually includes Joseph B. Jacobi (anti-Nietzsche usage), and James Martin Gillis (anti-Nietzsche usage). This attention to Petre's articulate, engaging, but dissenting minority views detract from the story of how other figures ("most American Catholics" Ratner-Rosenhagen confesses) controlled the dialogue in Catholic circles. Those figures were indeed troubled by Nietzsche's antifoundationalist thinking. The attention to Petre also ignores the question of whether she was responding to an already established, typical Catholic interpretation of Nietzsche.

My sense is that coverage of figures like Chesterton, Belloc, and Gilson would enrich the story of "scary Nietzsche", the bugaboo of traditionalist Christians. This is the Nietzsche who did not merely observe Western problems and decay, but was believed to be more than a messenger---indeed a source of decay and corruption. Covering this topic adds to both the transnational and American stories. It also raises interesting questions. What was the first Catholic reaction to Nietzsche? From whom did it arise, theologians, a particular order, or lay people? Why? When did it reach the U.S.? To what extent are Catholic thinkers still afraid of Nietzsche? Perhaps this topic was too big and complicated for American Nietzsche. If so, then I see need for another study.

A book that could have helped Ratner-Rosenhagen make deeper connections with the American Catholic intellectual scene is Jay P. Corrin's Catholic Intellectuals and the Challenge of Democracy (2002, and here's a review by S-USIH friend Kevin Schultz). Neither Maude Petre nor Nietzsche are prominent in the text (one mention each, I think), but Ratner-Rosenhagen could have used Corrin to triangulate, to enrich, her narrative of American Catholic views of Nietzsche. As for Chesterton and Nietzsche, numerous books and articles outline their "relationship" and provide opportunities to connect both to American Catholic audiences.

My next question about American Nietzsche moves away from religion and toward subject's status in American popular culture---his place as an icon. The question also borders on nit-picking. Given the importance of embodied ideas and Nietzsche's persona, well-established in the text (pp. 51-67), why is one of the more important "iconographic" images of Nietzsche, head supported by fist (right, from 1882, mentioned on p. 52), not in the book? Why the one 1882 photograph and not the other? Given the importance of how Nietzsche was imported to America, and perhaps oversold to Americans, the reader must be given all the images seen by Americans that the author feels is relevant. The omission was likely the result of a licensing problem, but that probably should have been mentioned in a note. The assertion of importance in the text requires some explanation.


Related to Nietzsche's persona, how did the culture industry, discussed (on pp. 231-33) but not applied to Nietzsche, fit into the picture? Is Nietzsche yet another case of a capitalism subsuming the current culture of cool? What of Nietzsche as a marketing phenomenon? Perhaps Ratner-Rosenhagen felt this was beyond the scope of the book? An example of where this topic could have been useful is in relation to H.L. Mencken. Being the consummate newspaper man and self-promoter, perhaps he oversold his story of Nietzsche in relation to his own industrious cultural criticism. A plastic Nietzsche would be convenient to a creative critic looking to mold an exotic character to his own ends.

Thinking more about Nietzsche's reception, what of his writing style? It would seem that a full accounting of readers' response must include some assessment of his mode of writing. I wonder if a concentrated discussion of that topic is needed early in the book. Several provocative quotes from Nietzsche are utilized in each chapter, but is there no account of his prose style in the literature that has assessed Nietzsche's legacy? Several of those cited by Ratner-Rosenhagen discuss his style, but she leaves control of that discussion to the historical actors. What is it about his writing mode that captivated audiences? Can we separate his writing style from his ideas?

On his ideas, here I have to rebuff at least one of the reviewers (e.g. Posnock). Ratner-Rosenhagen does briefly discuss Nietzsche's beliefs and philosophy beyond the broad strokes of foundationalism and antifoundationalism. In the opening pages of chapter two (pp. 69-74), for instance, Nietzsche's thoughts on God, morality, his own legacy are addressed by Ratner-Rosenhagen. And she uses specific texts. It's all done briefly, but Nietzsche's philosophy and more specific views are there. After the Introduction, Nietzsche is largely quoted only at the start of each chapter, and then the book leaves interpretation to the authors cited within each time period. This is proof positive that you, the reader, are getting the orthodox, unorthodox, and mixed receptions of Nietzsche. The reader will, at times, long for a fact-checking of Nietzsche and be frustrated. And I have little doubt that Ratner-Rosenhagen felt and resisted this urge, at times. Her successful resistance to the urge to judge Nietzsche's readers is what makes the book. It is an, not the intellectual history of Nietzsche. This is her contribution to the literature. Do not read American Nietzsche in the hope of finding a systematic categorization of his truth claims, either with regard to Nietzsche himself or his interpreters. You will only find a "foundational Nietzsche" in the detail demanded by fellow philosophers.

Although I am fine defending Ratner-Rosenhagen's brevity in relation to explaining Nietzsche's ideas, I did desire to know more about Nietzsche's literary corpus. First, a useful, brief addition to the text might have been a 1-2 page timeline of Nietzsche's signal life events, original publication dates of his books, and, last but not least, the dates of significant English translations. Second, I believe that some very brief, focused, and non-interpretive summaries of the contents of select Nietzsche works could have helped. For instance, the Gay Science appears in the text on at least six different occasions. But the reader will know no more about the book, as a whole, at the end of American Nietzsche as he or she had at the start. So, despite my praise for Ratner-Rosenhagen's resistance of the urge to fact check and re-present everything, and her focus on Nietzsche's ideas, it would have felt more satisfactory, in spots, to have a few of those summaries. This suggestion, with the timeline, might have added 5-10 pages to the text. That is significant. But I believe it would give the reader just enough comfort with Nietzsche's writings to triangulate some of the points of reception.

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This concludes Part V of my serial review of American Nietzsche. Next week I will continue with my own criticisms, praise, and questions.

The Plastic Nietzsche, Part IV: A Serial Review of Ratner-Rosenhagen's American Nietzsche

Prior Entries: Part I, Part II, and Part III.

Having closely analyzed early reviews by Ross Posnock, Thomas Meaney, and Alexander Star, today I turn toward one last assessment of American Nietzsche before offering my own praise and criticism.

I draw your attention to Roger Bellin's review, "Superman/Everyman," in The New Inquiry for its style as much as its content. Bellin's opening is my favorite opening from all the reviews. He begins with A Fish Called Wanda, noting the main character, Otto (played by Kevin Kline), and his parallels with one of the historical caricatures of Nietzsche: wild mustache, egomaniac, disdain for the everyman, and a penchant for violence. If the associations weren't clear enough, Otto also reads and quotes Nietzsche. Otto is a comical, literal Ubermensch. Bellin also relays Wanda's "dressing down" of Otto as a prelude to the work of unmasking of the protagonist in American Nietzsche.


After the eye-catching introduction, Bellin provocatively summarizes Ratner-Rosenhagen's work: "It is neither a book about Nietzsche, nor one that would help us to interpret his work, except, perhaps, by accumulated negative example. And perhaps more surprisingly, neither is it purely about American 'Nietzscheans,' at least in the narrow sense of self-identified, dogmatic followers. Instead it is a cultural history of the phenomenon that Ratner-Rosenhagen has aptly called 'the Nietzsche image': a chronicle of the places, often improbable, where Nietzsche's name, texts, ideas, and/or mustache have appeared in American usage, and the ends, often similarly unlikely, which they have been made to serve."

Bellin seems to agree with this reviewer that, in American, Nietzsche is at base plasticized---molded for use by each reader in multiple contexts over time. This is a truism for historians, but the wider public and enthusiasts of philosophy do not always, of course, think historically. Like other reviewers, Bellin is fascinated with Ratner-Rosenhagen's accounting of the forms Nietzsche has taken in American life. He concludes: "Americans have seen largely what they wanted to see, and what they wanted to fear, in their readings of Nietzsche."

Unlike Thomas Meaney (who reviewed American Nietzsche for the Wall Street Journal), who faulted Ratner-Rosenhagen for privileging the Emersonian readings of Nietzsche by Harold Bloom, Stanley Cavell, and Richard Rorty, Bellin praises the author for emphasizing the same. Bellin writes: "Indeed one of the most striking things about Nietzsche’s American reception is how late, and how partially still, the Emersonian connection has been made. Americans have recurrently found many of Emerson’s ideas seductively exotic when they returned home in German clothes. It’s only appropriate, then, that Ratner-Rosenhagen’s history both begins and ends with Emerson, the man we might call the one true 'American Nietzsche.'"

Excepting a few points of departure, Bellin's review then covers much of the same grounds of summary offered by other reviewers. Those points of departure do, however, hold forth some interesting topics. Bellin observed, for instance, that Ratner-Rosenhagen "is a lumper for left political categories, a splitter for the right." I didn't notice this while reading, and would have think more about the truth of his assertion. Bellin also draws the reader's attention to an obvious cultural marker: Superman the action-comic figure, first appearing in 1939 and made famous via television and eventually film. The reviewer notes: "Though Ratner-Rosenhagen does not remark on it, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster’s Action Comics Man of Steel surely owes his name to the American language’s absorption of Nietzsche’s terminology; that which does not kill us makes us stronger, with the exception of Kryptonite." Taking Bellin's speculation a bit further, could the comic figure Superman have been, ironically, an indirect attempt to rehabilitate Nietzsche's idea of the Ubermeansch? I'll cease my musing here because surely there's an article or two that explores this potential connection, either debunking or fulfilling Bellin's prophecy of a firm link.

Finally, bringing his observations full circle back to film, Bellin notes the presence of Nietzsche in Hitchcock's Rope. Since the film was based on the Leopold and Loeb case (covered in American Nietzsche, pp. 144-146), it is logical to underscore as a manifestation of Nietzsche's thought in popular culture. Ratner-Rosenhagen chose to stick with the case itself, but Bellin walks the reader through the film's significance to Nietzsche. Bellin dwells on Jimmy Stewart, who acted as both Clarence Darrow and the fictionalized philosophy professor ("Rupert Cadell"), and who taught Nietzsche to Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb. Bellin does fine job making connections between Nietzsche, the murdering boys, Emerson, and the film, so here is Bellin's narrative (bolds mine):

And so [Cadell's] confrontation with the killing committed by his students, in a stunning turn of stage-y Fifties didacticism, forces him to recant his Nietzschean doctrine: "Tonight you’ve made me ashamed of every concept I ever had of superior or inferior beings. But I thank you for that shame, because now I know that we are each of us a separate human being, Brandon, with the right to live and work and think as individuals, but with an obligation to the society we live in. By what right do you dare say that there’s a superior few to which you belong?" Cadell’s sudden conversion from philosophical Nietzschean into the familiar Capra-movie Jimmy Stewart sermonizer is completely intellectually incoherent, of course, but it’s also representative of the American image of Nietzsche as an almost irresistibly seductive force for immorality. In both Rope and the original Darrow argument, Nietzsche is anti-socialism incarnate: He has a disturbing power to warp the young, not educating them in moral self-reliance but rather tricking them into substituting self-reliance for morality.

Putting the somewhat anachronistic "Fifites didacticism" reference aside (the film was released in 1948, so I'd link it to film noir and early Cold War fears), I love it that Bellin linked the incoherence of Cadell's conversion to the general incoherence of American interpretations of Nietzsche. Nietzsche the evil trickster, much like the Nietzsche I personally encountered as an undergraduate, dominates in Rope.

As is the case with other reviewers Bellin admires Ratner-Rosenhagen's treatment of Walter Kaufmann. Here's how Bellin assessed her work: "It is...entirely fitting that Kaufmann is the subject of an entire chapter in American Nietzsche, which gives a thorough and very charitable account of his work, though Ratner-Rosenhagen’s defense is something of a recovery-job. While it’s true that criticizing Kaufmann as a translator and interpreter is perhaps too de rigueur these days in the academy, there are good reasons for this: The errors and distortions in the texts (as translator, he would occasionally omit a “not” in order to make a difficult passage less counterintuitive), the didactic oversimplification with which Kaufmann insisted on his own interpretations, along with his sometime simple-mindedness as a philosophical writer. Still, it is good to see Kaufmann’s tremendous accomplishment in reviving Nietzsche, much more than just a popularization, chronicled."

I am not familiar with that de rigueur criticism, but I am willing to take Bellin's word for it. 

To summarize, Bellin's review follows some familiar lines of critique (e.g. more popular culture could have been included) and praise (e.g. strong argument regarding reception, all variations of Nietzsche covered, Emerson links, Kaufmann acknowledged). I appreciated Bellin's style more than anything else. His review is one of the better ones for that reason alone.

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This concludes Part IV of my serial review of American Nietzsche. Having reviewed most of the reviews to my satisfaction, next week I will finally get to my very own criticisms, praise, and extensions.