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).

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.

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

Prior Entries: Part I, Part II

Reviewing the reviews of American Nietzsche continues to be a fruitful way to think about the book's contents as well as its strengths and weaknesses. The former is perhaps less systematic than one would want. But the latter helps us see the larger ideas with which American Nietzsche deals, and something of its place in the historiography.

After Posnock's review in The Nation, Thomas Meaney tackled American Nietzsche for The Wall Street Journal about six weeks later. Meaney opens his piece provocatively, asserting that Americans have a tendency to give Nietzsche a happy ending in the course of celebrating individualism and creativity. Unlike Nietzsche, we prioritize efficiency and equality in individuals over excellence. Meaney then praises Ratner-Rosenhagen's goal (as he sees it): to answer the question about what "our use and abuse of Nietzsche's thinking says about us?" Meaney praises the author's connection between Emerson and Nietzsche on the notion of self as "constantly becoming." We "generate meaning" for ourselves "through a continuous act of self-creation." Meaney then dwells on the fact that H.L. Mencken found inspiration in Nietzsche, and that "Mencken's columns put Nietzsche's name on the American cultural map." That stamp was diminished by the Leopold and Loeb trial, as well as because of the Nazis' appropriation of Nietzsche. But then there was a turn in Nietzsche's fate. Meaney asserts that Ratner-Rosenhagen's tracking of the influence of Walter Kaufman during the post-war period was the "best chapter of her book." And Meaney is right to reinforce the book's argument that "the Nietzsche we encounter in print today is largely Kaufmann's Nietzsche—mediated by his translations, collations and introductions."

Meaney critiques the book by arguing that "Ratner-Rosenhagen is not quite up-front about the story she is telling."
Meaney believes she privileges the Emersonian readings of Nietzsche by Harold Bloom, Stanley Cavell, and Richard Rorty offered at the end of American Nietzsche. Here I think Meaney has confused both the complexity of their reappropriations of Nietzsche, as well as the place of those three in the chronology of the twentieth century, with Ratner-Rosenhagen's intentions (i.e. Meaney has mistaken narration with valuation). I assert confusion by the reviewer because Ratner-Rosenhagen shows neither favor nor disapprobation of the Bloomian, Cavellian, and Rortian Nietzsches.

Bloom both used Nietzsche himself, in relation to his work on the anxiety of influence (American Nietzsche, 276-279), and used Nietzsche to critique deconstructionist thought (pp. 279-283). Ratner-Rosenhagen points out that Rorty was a foundationalist before embracing a Nietzschean pragmatism, or "pragmatist antifoundationalism" (p. 285-287). She notes that Rorty's Nietzsche led Rorty to a "no-man's land between public commitments and private longings that [Rorty's] pragmatist critics found so objectionable" (p. 293). Rorty could not reconcile pragmatic instrumentalism and democracy, and lost the "spirit of social hope." Ratner-Rosenhagen concludes that Rorty found "no way to philosophically justify America" (p. 295). That doesn't exactly make for an optimistic reading of Rorty's Nietzsche, or Rorty's Emerson. As for Cavell, Ratner-Rosenhagen is not critical of his use of Nietzsche via Emerson. Indeed, it's Cavell's knowledge of Emerson that intrigues the author (p. 297). Cavell helps Ratner-Rosenhagen bring her story full circle. Cavell also helps the author tackle the question of Nietzsche's significance to philosophers and in the history of philosophy (pp. 297-302). Ratner-Rosenhagen uses Cavell to reinforce part of the book's thesis:

If, as Nietzsche instructed, knowledge exxacts a mode of life, then the reverse is also true: a mode of life exacts a knowledge. In Emerson, antifoundationalism is that American way of life. Emersonian antifoundationalism is not a theory, it is a way of thinking and living in a world without foundations. ...From a European past America cannot domesticate, Emerson moves toward a New World of men (and women) thinking, finding their way everyday, the here and now, a culture ready to be "born again." ...Cavell achieved his Emerson by putting him in constant dialogue with Nietzsche. His Emerson and his Nietzsche finish each other's thoughts. (pp. 302-303).

Meaney rightly, then, pegs the Emerson anchor. But he misses the simple fact that this is how history played out---no matter that it fits nicely with the Ratner-Rosenhagen's goal. The only way to know whether the book's author manipulated the narrative is to explore Nietzsche's place in philosophy and intellectual history after the 1990s. But the author defers to the limits of hindsight when she only offers an Epilogue dealing with Allan Bloom's work through the 1980s, and Bloom did not write about Emerson's influence on Nietzsche.

Three weeks after Meaney's review and almost two months after Posnock's essay, the next prominent reivew of American Nietzsche came from Alexander Star. Star is a senior book review editor for The New York Times, and his piece appeared January 15, 2012. Star's review, using Ratner-Rosenhagen's findings, answers the question posed by Posnock: "Who got Nietzsche right?" Star's answer is everyone. Everyone got Nietzsche right because his answers, his aphorisms, were capacious enough for for almost every kind of philosophical question. This could only be the case, of course, if there were contradictions in Nietzsche's thought and in the thinking of his appropriators. When that is the case, adjudication simple does not pay for the scholar. Star concluded: "American Nietzsche is a sober work of intellectual history, but as Nietzsche insisted, all scholarship reflects the temperament of its creator, and it’s clear that Ratner-Rosenhagen finds neither the poststructuralist nor the conservative Nietzsche at all satisfying." 

Star mildly critiques Ratner-Rosenhagen's work on two points. The first is a scholarly point with with two parts. Star asserts that American Nietzsche does not attend to Nietzsche's thoughts on Emerson's failings. Star argues that "she doesn't take into full account how Nietzsche thought his beloved Emerson was 'too much infatuated with life' or how he doubted most people could ever discover anything at all." The former, in relation to the knowledge of the author of this essay, is an argument between scholars. I cannot say whether Nietzsche's Emerson was correct on all points. But I can see how that might color one's appreciation for the deepest sources of personal liberation in American thought. Still, if thoughtful Americans were not precisely appropriating Emerson via Nietzsche on that topic, they were were appropriating Nietzsche as Walter Kaufman connected him to the existentialists. Nietzsche was going to find a home with most any American audience alieanated from the conformist aspects of middle-class culture. 

On Star's latter point about novelty, the structure of the sentence makes it unclear whether he was referring to Nietzsche or Emerson, so we'll have to let that scholarly point lie. But novelty does matter in that the Overman will likely need to find some way to oversome the limitations of his times. If tradition (i.e. God) is dead and unhelpful, how did Nietzsche see how a new paradigm could come into being? Nietzsche's answer seems to have been less about what would come into being and more about the fact that mankind had the inner resources to stand, to survive.

The second critique, not pressed by Star as a failing of the book, is that Ratner-Rosenhagen could have done more in relation to Nietzsche's "broader presence in culture." He wrote:

In 1933, the Hays Office forced the producers of the Barbara Stanwyck film “Baby Face” to remove “The Will to Power” from the hands of a German-American cobbler whose paeans to self-fulfillment inspire the Stanwyck character to become a prostitute. Nietzsche’s more bombastic utterances would later enter popular culture without hindrance. In every generation Nietzsche finds admirers who blur his message with that of Aleister Crowley, the Nietzsche-reading occultist who wrote, “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law."

So, is Star saying that he wanted Ratner-Rosenhagen to catalag every unmediated presence of Nietzsche in American culture? I don't think so. But is he being fair to the limitations of her study---her focus on how Nietzsche was actively and intentionally used and appropriated? I don't think so. Wouldn't any historian prefer clear manisfestations of use (e.g. letters and publications) over speculating about how unnamed masses might have absorbed Nietzsche through popular culture "without hindrance"? This is not to say that Ratner-Rosenhagen could not have used those manifestations. And she could have perhaps provided more of a rationale for their exclusion (i.e. which unmediated appearances may have mattered or not). But the author notes that Nietzsche fads have occurred, but she never promised to explore the full circumstances of each. As Star himself notes, this is a "sober work of intellectual history." As such it is focused on the life of the mind where empirical evidence exists.

Star doesn't answer Posnock's question about "Who got Nietzsche right?" for Ratner-Rosenhagen, but Star does pose and answer another question. In the final paragraph of his review he queries: "If Nietzsche was terrible, was he also beneficial?" Star cites "Princeton philosopher Alexander Nehamas" (note the "credential dropping") to argue that Nietzsche's perspectivism does not argue that all beliefs are "equally valid," but rather that your beliefs are not necessarily true for everyone.  Since, as Ratner-Rosenhagen similarly noted in the context of Cavell, that beliefs are associated with a way of life, the fact that ways of life exist for individuals might imply that there is no one set of beliefs that can apply to us all. We should accept, then, that American individualism has always contained, and will likely always contain, some degree of antifoundationalism. Or, as Star puts it, we should be able to live with the fact that "our convictions are our own." This, he believes, would be a beneficial contribution from Nietzsche to America's culture---provided Americans took the true Nietzsche seriously, or really understood him.

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This concludes Part III of my serial review of American Nietzsche. Next week I will analyze the last of the reviews, and then enter into my own reading of the book's weaknesses and strengths---with an eye toward offering larger extensions and impressions.

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

Prior entry: Part I.

Several positive reviews of American Nietzsche have already appeared. Indeed, though the book lists a publication date of 2012, reviews began appearing in November and December of 2011. Ridiculous as it may seem in relation to the present publication of my own review, I think I received my copy in early December of last year. (That's right. I've had this book for ten months before writing my review. In my defense, I did finish reading it in early April. All I can say is that sometimes life gets in the way of my scholarly work.) That aside, given the earlier accolades and critiques, what can be offered here that has not already been said? Let's review the reviews. Along with helping ensure that my analysis will be different, the reviews provide a chance to reflect on the contents of American Nietzsche---and whether the reviewers gave that content their full consideration.

Ross Posnock's November 21, 2011 essay, titled "American Idol," appeared in The Nation. Posnock offers both summary and critique. Like the book, he begins, rightly I believe, with Emerson---noting the similarities between him and Nietzsche. Posnock then offers some of Nietzsche's biography, reminding the reader of the latter's emergence as the antifoundational "enfant terrible of modernism." The review then transitions to one of Ratner-Rosenhagen's prominent theme: the notion of the "philosopher willing to go it alone without inherited faith, without institutional affiliation, without rock or refuge for his truth claims" (p. 17, of book). Next Posnock recalls, using the book, Nietzsche's call to overcome (i.e. the overman/Übermensch) and its disastrous appropriation by fascism. Most importantly, however, is the rectification of that misappropriation by Walter Kaufman. He connected, recovered really, Nietzsche's thought in relation to existentialism and the American tradition of rugged individualism. Posnock then backs up, moving his review chronologically toward the Nietzsche vogue of the early nineteenth century. The reviewer argues that one of Ratner-Rosenhagen's "striking findings" was the diverse appropriations of Nietzschean thought, which results in some "amusing, if inadvertent, juxtapositions," such as "Lionel Trilling and Huey Newton [being] discussed alongside Hugh Hefner...and Hitler." Like Posnock, I appreciated the fact that the range of thinkers presented in American Nietzsche makes it an intriguing read.

Posnock then poses the rhetorical question of "Who got Nietzsche right?"
A worthy question. In Posnock's hands it serves as a transition to discuss how Ratner-Rosenhagen avoids the adjudication of claims about the philosopher in favor of listening to those who received and used Nietzsche's works (p. 24, of text). The judgment is beside the point. Posnock does not directly say whether he approves of the approach, but he most certainly does not condemn it. In discussing the reception of Nietzsche in America, Posnock notes the personal letters from unknown figures sent to Elisabeth Forster-Nietzsche. Apart from these lesser known figures, Ratner-Rosenhagen also covers public figures and intellectuals who responded to and used Nietzsche: Josiah Royce, Judith Butler, Stanley Cavell, Harold Bloom, and Richard Rorty. For all these figures, Posnock rightly identifies that the dualism, the dichotomy, used in American Nietzsche underlying their thinking is 'foundationalism' v. 'antifoundationalism'. Posnock notes that "in the final two pages of the concluding chapter, each term appears no fewer than ten times."

Here the review turns toward criticism---though less of Ratner-Rosenhagen and more of the method behind the text (i.e. reception history). Posnock begins this line of critique by noting that the author "is a superb listener, but a consequence of her withholding judgment is that Nietzsche’s ideas—and Emerson’s, for that matter—tend to be rendered in broad, formulaic strokes, the principal one being the antithesis of foundationalism and antifoundationalism." This, in Posnock's view, results in a deeper, theoretical problem with the book: "From the outset...antifoundationalism is ubiquitous but only hurriedly defined—'the denial of universal truth'—and never reflected upon critically." Posnock continued, ultimately linking the problem back to an observation by Emerson:

American Nietzsche also seems to misunderstand the nature of the antifoundationalist claim, which, as the literary theorist and legal scholar Stanley Fish rightly noted years ago, is a “thesis about how foundations emerge” and refutes the metaphysical assumption that “foundations do not emerge but simply are, anchoring the universe and thought from a point above history and culture.” ...There is a basic logical problem here that Emerson identifies in “Circles”: “Yet this incessant movement and progression, which all things partake, could never become sensible to us, but by contrast to some principle of fixture or stability in the soul. While the eternal generation of circles proceeds, the eternal generator abides.”

In other words, in Posnock's view, because Ratner-Rosenhagen merely listens and does not adjudicate, one can finish the text thinking that one can actually "function in a world of constant flux, without foundations." Here, I think, Posnock's critique misses the mark. Is it the historian's job to adjudicate? Perhaps. But the nature of the author's study necessitates a minimization of that analytical path. Further, she gets antifoundationalism right in the text. Ratner-Rosenhagen may not reflect on this point extensively, but she most certainly observes that Nietzsche saw foundations as rooted in "history and culture." It is noted in the book's passages about Wilbur Urban's encounter with Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals (pp. 29-31). And, like it or not, we know Nietzsche's solution: the Ubermensch. Did contemporaries and enthusiasts offer wild interpretations of Nietzsche's solution? Absolutely. But must we, as historical thinkers, attend only to those wrong-headed enthusiasms? Ratner-Rosenhagen rightly notes the ambiguity of Nietzsche's Ubermensch in Thus Spake Zarathustra. The figure, taken as an exemplar, could root the reader-follower in a vision of transcendant man who overcame. The Ubermensch, then, is a kind of Enlightenment figure of secular progress written on the earthbound individual (p. 110-111). This is Nietzsche's proposed foundation for man: a kind of Emersonian self-reliance.

If there is any problem in American thought as it has appropriated Nietzsche's thought, it's that those historical figures have forgotten Posnock's, Fish's, and Emerson's point. The Ubermensch is not a weak-minded fascist conformist, but a strong individualist unafraid of the future. As Ratner-Rosenhagen notes, some interpreters saw in the Ubermensch a "self-sovereign...[who] had found his natural habitat in [America's] culture of possessive individualism" (p. 111). Problems with rugged individualism and prot-Libertarianism notwithstanding, this was a part of the new foundation of American culture. This was the American Nietzsche. Posnock may not like it, and perhaps neither does Ratner-Rosenhagen. But it's good to look hard and clearly at the historical Nietzsche without fascist-colored glasses.

It seems, then, that Posnock wanted another book, something more prescriptive and assertive. But a presentist study, of that type anyway, was never the goal of American Nietzsche. Ratner-Rosenhagen's historicism could never satisfy Posnock's not-so-rhetorical question: "Who got Nietzsche right?" The book asserts, in essence, that this question can't be answered. Nietzsche's thought was plastic; it could be transformed in the heat of one's passions and imagination. Nietzsche's writings are too vague to give solid ground, to provide transcendence. This will never satisfy philosophers, historians, and earnest readers who seek ultimate truths. Then again, mere historical thinking never really satisfies those who put history solely in the service of the present.

The next installments of this serialized essay will address other reviews, and then my own impressions, critiques, and extensions. - TL

FYI: To Be Continued

In deference to the round table on Ray Haberski's God and War, I will defer entry #2 in my serial review of Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen's American Nietzsche until next Thursday, 11/8/2012. - TL

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

Review of Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen's American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). ISBN: 978-0-226-70581-1. 452 pages.

Reviewed by Tim Lacy
Loyola University Chicago


As is probably the case with many Midwesterners who grew up in small towns and rural areas of the American Heartland, my first encounters with the acolytes and intellectual followers of Friedrich Nietzsche came in college. As an undergraduate at the University of Missouri, I was introduced to several iterations of what Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen calls the American Nietzsche. Because I had never heard of Nietzsche, let alone read any of his work, these introductions were mostly superficial. My memory is imperfect, but I think I have encountered at least three Nietzsches during the (overly) long receiving end of my educational career.

It was Christianity, strangely enough, that introduced me to Nietzsche. My involvement with the Mizzou chapter of Campus Crusade for Christ brought me into contact with an ethereal, evil Nietzsche---a specter that haunts the dreams of those active campus evangelizers. To them Nietzsche was a formidable, seductive, and roguish character who was also, not surprisingly, the sworn enemy of Christianity. This was Nietzsche as the irreligious (nay evil) philosopher archetype who denounced religion as superstition. This figure was symbolic of the cultural and moral drift---the decay---of Western life. He was a clever, sinister foreigner indirectly degraded America's Christian civilization. It was symbolically fitting, to Crusaders, that this sexually profligate man was downed by syphilis, the disease that, in the judgment of some heartless Crusaders, purposely rid the earth of unscrupulous characters like Al Capone. This sad end enabled Crusaders to build a comical caricature, a straw man, of Nietzsche that was easy for budding Christian evangelists to knock down. I am pretty sure that this portrait was painted, in part, by the writings of C.S. Lewis, G.K. Chesterton, and other lesser Fundamentalist-type writers of the early twentieth century. It was  probably around this time that I first heard of the work of Allan Bloom and his relentless criticism of Nietzsche-inspired, late-twentieth-century moral relativity.


The second incarnation of Nietzsche I enountered, also at Mizzou, was similar to the Crusade Nietzsche but more personal and confrontational. This occurred shortly after graduation when I obtained a job interviewing victims of the 1993 Missouri River floods. I was part of a team consisting of older undergraduates, new twenty-something graduates like myself, and graduate students who fanned out across central Missouri, invading small river towns, to ascertain how flood victims dealt with the tragedy, then and after. A member of my interview group was a graduate philosophy student who openly embraced (is there any other way?) a Nietzschean perspective on life. In his interpretation that meant being a rebel philosopher---a provocateur who both challenged foundations and brusquely criticized one's lack of ballast in thinking. The young man had neatly trimmed facial hair, so he did not fit the familiar aesthetic of a wildly bearded, hirsute, intense Nietzsche---an iteration documented Ratner-Rosehagen in American Nietzsche. Still, the young man's constant challenges made him something of a rogue---and a pain in my ass. I might have grown to admire his relentless intelligence if he had not blocked my advances on an attractive young colleague. When I learned he slept with her, it just reinforced my Crusade-informed vision of the profligate rogue Nietzsche.

After my Crusade and Rogue Nietzsches, the last academic-related impression of him occurred during graduate school. This Nietzsche is probably most familiar to USIH readers so I will keep my recollections brief, and more personal. Like many historians-in-training, I became familiar with this Academic Nietzsche courtesy of courses where professors relayed the thought of deconstructionists and feminist theorists. Once again, I found myself uncomfortable. The Academic Nietzsche was unnerving, annoying, and, to my taste, wrong-headed. I saw Nietzsche as did Allan Bloom---as the inspiration for much that was wrong with the academy. That said, I had to know this Nietzsche. This iteration was neither comical nor merely provocative; utilizing caricatures would not do. I knew that some study of him and his intellectual descendants would be absolutely necessary. Even so, I managed to limit my direct contact with Nietzsche himself. Upon attainment of the PhD, I had managed to read only brief snippets of his works and had only a kind of advanced E.D. Hirschian sense of Nietzsche's biography.

There is something familiar and unfamiliar, silly and serious, in each of these iterations. As such they introduce a dominant theme of American Nietzsche: the plasticity of the man and his thought in relation to American intellectual life. Each of my encounters, or at least a variation of each, is covered in Ratner-Rosenhagen's powerful study. But American Nietzsche offers a much more. The thesis of her study is that Nietzsche's philosophical thinking is connected to the United States in two ways. First, his philosophy is inextricably rooted in the work of a single American thinker: Ralph Waldo Emerson. The book details this debt, particularly in its Prologue and Introduction (pp. 1-27). Inasmuch as Emerson is a characteristic and canonical American thinker, American Nietzsche argues, successfully I believe, that Nietzsche shares that stage. This was a revelation to me, and it will bother those with only a superficial knowledge of Nietzsche. This half of the book's thesis undercuts the exoticism and foreignness that both attracted and repelled segments of America.

This brings us to the second mode of Nietzsche's connections to America. These links begin with the ongoing, two-way traffic between Germany and America---enabled and mediated by his sister, Elisabeth Forster-Nietzsche---that occurred after the author's death. This connection waxed and waned all through the twentieth century, but consisted of the reception of Nietzsche's works and person in the United States. This portion of Ratner-Rosenhagen's thesis is multifaceted, dealing with popular culture, religious figures (i.e. appropriations and rejections), cultural criticism, intellectual life, and, in the end, the Culture Wars. These topics come together, as purposed by Ratner-Rosenhagen and otherwise, to argue for the importance of Nietzsche's thought in relation to democracy and democratic culture in the United States (pp. 23-24, 26). Our reception of Nietzsche, over various time periods, measures our receptiveness to the contradictions, problems, and possibilities of democracy.

Ratner-Rosenhagen's thesis and coverage of the relationship between Nietzsche and the United States makes American Nietzsche, I believe, an indispensable companion for intellectual historians who need to think through their works' relationships to Nietzsche's life and writings. It is not exhaustive or perfect, as I will relay, but it is an exemplary work of reception history and transnational history.

This concludes the first part of my review of American Nietzsche. This serialization will continue in the next weeks, wherein I will underscore parts of the book's contents, and offer my impressions, praise, and criticisms (quibbles, really). - TL

Reception History: A New Word for An Old Methodology?*

A few weeks back, while I was reading Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen’s American Nietzsche, I posted here asking readers to list their favorite reception histories. Thanks to you all for helping put together a very comprehensive list. Today, having just read Martin Woessner’s really smart Heidegger in America, I post again about reception history, this time asking more of a meta-question: Are intellectual history and reception history two words for the same thing? Woessner comes close to making this argument, at least insofar as intellectual history is understood to be the history of thought and the history of thinking, not necessarily the social history of intellectuals.

One thing I noticed about both the arguments of Ratner-Rosenhagen and Woessner: The key to understanding the American reception of Nietzsche and Heidegger is understanding America. Such is the logic, at least, of reception history as they seem to understand it. Reception history for them is about how ideas morph when moving from one context to the next, such as from Germany to the United States, or from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth centuries. Their reception history is also interested in how ideas represent culture; how ideas help people cope with culture; how ideas even sometimes remake culture. Ratner-Rosenhagen “argues that confrontations with Nietzsche laid bare a fundamental concern driving modern American thought: namely, the question of the grounds, or foundations, for modern American thought and culture itself.” In other words, she is less interested in Nietzsche, per se, or those intellectuals who fashioned themselves “American Nietzscheans,” and more focused on those “American readers making their way to their views of themselves and their modern America by thinking through, against, and around Nietzsche’s stark challenges.”

Woessner frames his book similarly: “Heidegger’s reception tells us as much—if not more—about the course of American intellectual and cultural history over the past half century as it does about Heidegger himself.” But Woessner takes this a few steps further, in what amounts to an ambitious if not downright grandiose methodological plea. I will quote Woessner extensively to give you a taste of his strong methodological gesture.

“Detailing how Heidegger was (re)made in the U.S.A. will demonstrate how the history of ideas might be reconfigured for a new era.”

“And yet many intellectual historians continue to work as if such messy realities (that texts and contexts go together) do not impinge upon the life of the mind, as if the widest context necessitated by intellectual-historical inquiry is that of an intellectual’s biography. In doing so, they needlessly narrow the scope of the history of ideas when, in truth, intellectual history is relevant to almost all aspects of historical reality.”

“If these assumptions are correct, then it can only be beneficial to view all history of thought in terms of reception history. What the intellectual historian does, fundamentally, is trace networks of reception: he exposes hidden and not-so-hidden influences; he charts legacies of thinkers, books, ideas, discourses, and concepts.”

“All intellectual historians are interested in the fate of ideas as much as their origins, especially since every origin is always already a point of reception itself. Although the dynamics of reception are more noticeable when translation across national or linguistic boundaries occurs, because the distances between the contexts of creation and reception are often greatest in these instances, we should not lose sight of the fact that ideas are always and everywhere caught up in a process of reception.”

“From the moment an idea is expressed, either verbally or in print, it is traveling.”

What do you all make of this? Is it a new way of saying something old? Or is it a stark challenge? I’m genuinely undecided.

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* My title is, of course, a riff on James Kloppenberg's classic article, "Pragmatism: An Old Name for Some New Ways of Thinking?"

Tim's Light Reading (11-24-2011): The Thanksgiving Edition

If you're bored with your relatives, TV, or the general holiday scene---or if you love USIH so much that you're browsing here on a Thanksgiving whim---something from the entries below may be of interest. I will offer up reflections on our conference next week. - TL

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1 (of 8). Nietzsche in America

Check out this review of Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen's new book, Nietzsche in America. I don't know how I'm going to top Ross Posnock for my USIH review, but don't count on seeing my effort soon; I just got my copy of the book yesterday.


2. Middletown and Intellectual History

Slate's John Plotz writes here on his attempt to make some sense of the newly released readership information from Muncie (IN) City Library (from the 1891-1902 period). It's an interesting read for many different reasons. But I was struck by the following two paragraphs in relation to how intellectual historians conduct some of their work (bolds mine):

The book I’m currently trying to write is about the way that ordinary readers—Louis, me, or you [Louis is late 19th-century Muncie reader]—can sometimes feel drawn into a book, so far into it, that it gives us a partial sense of a life elsewhere—until we recall that our hands ache, our eyes are tired, and it’s time to pick up the kids. My working title is Semi-Detached, and that about summed up my feelings by the end of my Bloom experiment. I was partially there with Louis in the Muncie library—but I was also a very, very long way away. I’d gathered and crunched some data, and heard some stories, but …. I was always gaining on Louis, but somehow I was never fast enough to fall into stride with him, to turn sideways and find myself looking him straight in the eye. I was struck by Stuart’s reaction [one of Louis's grandchildren] when I asked him what we could deduce from his granddad’s reading. He laughed and said, “You know, I don’t even think the books I read as a kid say much about who I am now. It was all baseball then and I haven’t even seen a game in 20 years. Even as a grown man I changed; I feel like I’m in my fourth lifetime now.”

Stuart’s point about the gap between what you read and who you are got me thinking. Maybe the way Louis receded as I chased after him was not my problem but my answer. In the books Louis checked out he found, as readers everywhere always do, more than just a perfect mirror of his own life (as if “what Middletown read” told us “what Middletown really was”). He also found a way out: a glimpse of the Italy where scientists experimented with frog’s legs, or the state of Mississippi back when killing a slave was a simple property crime. The books he read might even have helped him catch a glimpse of what he wanted his own future to be working in the world of mechanics and of physics, far from Muncie (“Go West, young man”—yes, until you hit the Philippines). Thanks to those books, he too had a telescope. Like mine, it was small and imperfect, with no guarantees about the accuracy of what he glimpsed through it. Still, coming from the sort of Muncie life that he did (his mom had moved them in with in-laws, had even been threatened with having to send the kids off to various relatives) I bet that glimpse at a distant world loomed fairly large for him.

I forward these passages for your consideration because I often think about the difference between what my subjects read and what they actually took away---what they used.


3. Is a Rise in Faculty Salaries the Cause of Higher Education Tuition Inflation?

Reuter's columnist Felix Salmon says no. Here's a key passage from the piece (bolds mine):

Overall, if we exclude for-profit schools, which were a tiny part of the landscape in 1999, we have seen tuition fees rise by 32% between 1999 and 2009. Over the same period, instruction costs rose just 5.6% — the lowest rate of inflation of any of the components of education services. (“Student services costs” and “operations and maintenance costs” saw the greatest inflation, at 15.2% and 18.1% respectively, but even that is only half the rate that tuition increased.)

The real reason why tuition has been rising so much has nothing to do with [William] Baumol, and everything to do with the government. Page 31 of the report is quite clear: “except for private research institutions,” it says, “tuitions were increasing almost exclusively to replace losses from state revenues or other private revenue sources.”

In other words, tuition costs are going up just because state subsidies are going down.

...It's the State Subsidy, Stupid!


4. Herbert Marcuse's FBI File

Lawrence Winsaft of the UC-San Diego Philosophy Department has done a little research on his department and uncovered some faulty FBI book assessments of Herbert Marcuse's works (esp. Reason and Revolution, One Dimensional Man, and Essay on Liberation). Good stuff.


5. Heretics and the Gospel of Education

In a collective review of four recent books about education (higher and secondary), titled "The Educational Lottery" and published in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Steven Brint frames the books in a novel way. He posits each author as a particular kind of heretic in relation to the pervasive American myth that education is at the root of all social, political, and cultural progress. Here are a few paragraphs from the review's opening (bolds mine):

Education is as close to a secular religion as we have in the United States. In a time when Americans have lost faith in their government and economic institutions, millions of us still believe in its saving grace. ...“The answer to all of our national problems,” as Lyndon Johnson put it in 1965, “comes down to one single word: education.”

The American education gospel is built around four core beliefs. First, it teaches that access to higher levels of education should be available to everyone, regardless of their background or previous academic performance. Every educational sinner should have a path to redemption. (Most of these paths now run through community colleges.) Second, the gospel teaches that opportunity for a better life is the goal of everyone and that education is the primary — and perhaps the only — road to opportunity. Third, it teaches that the country can solve its social problems — drugs, crime, poverty, and the rest — by providing more education to the poor. Education instills the knowledge, discipline, and the habits of life that lead to personal renewal and social mobility. And, finally, it teaches that higher levels of education for all will reduce social inequalities, as they will put everyone on a more equal footing. ...

The advance of the education gospel has been shadowed from the beginning by critics who claim that education, despite our best efforts, remains a bastion of privilege. For these critics, it is not that the educational gospel is wrong (a truly democratic, meritocratic school system would, if it existed, be a good thing); it is that the benefits of education have not yet spread evenly to every corner of American society, and that the trend toward educational equality may be heading in the wrong direction. They decry the fact that schools in poor communities have become dropout factories and that only the wealthy can afford the private preparatory schools that are the primary feeders to prestigious private colleges. The higher education Establishment recognizes critics like these as family. They accept the core beliefs of the education gospel and are impatient only with its slow and incomplete adoption.

Brint then goes on to outline several schools of heresy: "the new restrictionism"; "the 'free the students' school"; "the 'fool’s gold' group"; and "the 'true educators' sect."


6. Occupy AHA?

Werner Herzog's Bear says yes, and has drawn up a preliminary manifesto to aid the cause. Here are the first five demands (of ten total) in the manifesto:

1. That the AHA officially repudiate the rhetoric of "overproduction" and acknowledge that the lack of good jobs is the biggest cause of the current crisis in employment for historians.
2. That the AHA create high-level positions in its organizational structure specifically intended to be filled by and to advance the interests of graduate students and contingency faculty members.
3. That the AHA encourage departments that persist in using non-tenured labor to establish permanent positions with decent pay, health benefits, and job security, and to officially censure those departments that fail to meet these standards.
4. That the AHA recognize the current crisis in academic publishing and encourage departments to make their tenure and hiring decisions.
5. That the AHA put an end to the conference job register and discourage the practice of on-site conference interviews, and encourage their replacement with preliminary interviews over the phone of via video chat. ...

I think I like 3 and 4 from this excerpted list the best. Check out the rest here.


7. Pepper Spray

It's not organic.


8. History Corps

If the AHA wants to avoid scenes with pepper spray and an OWS-style movement, they could do worse than support a plan offered by USIH friend Culture Rover (aka Michael Kramer): he calls it "History Corps." Kramer's plan expands on one offered by Jesse Lemisch in his dialogue with Anthony Grafton (latest installments here and here). Here's Kramer's summation:

This kind of endeavor would address the very real economic issues that younger historians and aspiring historians face. But it does so not by telling them that they should have gone to business school. Instead, it offers a vision of historians as professionals. It gives them dignity and it more clearly distinguishes the distinctive skills, perspectives, and expertise that historical training brings. It’s not about making historical training applicable for other fields, but rather of clarifying how history as a field is necessary to a good society.

Read the whole thing here.

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Enjoy! - TL