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.

Bloom Beyond the Culture Wars, or How The Closing of the American Mind Changed My Life: a Testimonial

Guest post by Rivka Maizlish, University of Wisconsin-Madison

One of the things I most appreciated about the U.S. Intellectual History Conference's annual return to the CUNY Graduate Center was my faithful pilgrimage up the thirty blocks from the conference to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where I would sit before Jacques-Louis David's The Death of Socrates, and listen. People rarely walk by this painting in silence. Young students attempt to impress their parents by rehearsing lessons from history class about Socrates and Plato. Older visitors recall their education, uncovering buried memories of the Phaedo or the Apology and the philosopher's final words. Gazing at Socrates' hand over the cup, people often ask a companion, “remind me again why he was put to death?” It's always a “remind me,” as if the story was already within them, but lately lost somehow (in Plato's dialogue, the Meno, Socrates suggests that all learning is remembering). A few people stop at the painting just long enough to murmur “the unexamined life is not worth living,” while cantankerous philosophy students pass by shaking their heads, declaiming to their friends that Socrates need not have died, if only he hadn't been such a jerk to the jury that sentenced him. 

Sometimes, sitting in front of the painting, I overheard a question and offered an answer, starting a conversation about democracy or the soul. It seemed fitting to end an inspiring day at a conference about ideas in America by descending into the agora (or ascending the steps of the Met) to observe Americans confronted with philosophy-- at least in the form of David's painting, the story it tells, and the figure of Socrates. The dozens of visitors who stop and consider this painting experience a rare, if brief, interaction with the meaning of philosophy.

I made my first pilgrimage to visit Socrates after a conference panel discussion about Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind left me frustrated. Amid snickers and one whispered, “he was gay!” panel attendees mocked Bloom's description of his excitement when his college girlfriend explained that the University of Chicago clock-tower was a phallic symbol. This admittedly silly line is followed by a more serious declaration. “It was hard to tell whether the meaning of it all was that I was about to lose my virginity or penetrate the mysteries of being,” confesses Bloom. “An admirable confusion,” he adds. (1) The discrepancy between these two lines from Bloom's infamous best-seller— the goofy business about the clock-tower phallus on the one hand, and the embrace of a salutary confusion between sex and education on the other— illustrates the mistake historians have made in considering Bloom and the meaning of Closing. Jumping at the easy opportunity to ridicule this book, they have neglected its more compelling themes. 

Sure, much of Closing is absurd at best. Exhibit A: “Women,” Bloom asserts, “have no basis for claiming that men should share their desire for children or assume responsibility for them.” (2) This is one of the least sexist statements in Bloom's published works; his words about rape in Love and Friendship would have the RNC clamoring for his resignation, were he a Republican candidate. And let's not forget my favorite line in Closing: “Richard Nixon, with his unerring instinct for the high moral ground . . .” (3) Part of me still thinks this must be a joke. But all this is the Culture Wars Bloom, the only Bloom present when the conference panel attendees discussed and ridiculed Closing. Behind this Bloom is the Bloom that asks “Are we lovers anymore?” and then boldly declares, “this is my way of putting the educational question of our times.” (4) Without impugning the value of studying Closing in connection with the contest to direct American values in an anti-foundationalist world that became known as the “Culture Wars,” I submit that this book inhabits several other contexts, and that historians have much to gain—both personally and professionally—from considering Bloom beyond the Culture Wars.
My first encounter with Closing, in the middle of the last year of my undergraduate studies, was liberating. Naive and privileged, I had come to college convinced that I could change the world, and spent most of my time telling myself it would happen if I just kept doing useful things like knocking on doors, registering voters, and reminding my classmates how much money the U.S. government had spent in Iraq. Closing showed me that if I could follow Socrates' exhortation to “know thyself,” and encourage my peers to do the same by building intellectual community based on friendship and pursuit of truth (even unto its innermost parts), I would be doing more good than could ever come from my political work. Furthermore, Closing suggested that I had my whole life to conform to some external notion of justice. College education was about creatively challenging conventional ideas of the good, the just, the virtuous. And one did not have to do this alone. Past thinkers, from Homer to Nietzsche, could help my friends and me explore different ideas and re-imagine what was possible (“So this has existed once, at least—and is therefore a possibility, this way of life, this way of looking at the human scene,” wrote Nietzsche). (5) As a freshman I had been assigned Plato's Republic in an introduction to political theory course. I never opened it. I think I figured that something so old couldn't possible be of any use to me. Three years later, I was home for winter vacation when I finished Closing. The first thing I did after putting the book down was frantically search my parents' house for anything by Plato. Bloom wrote so lovingly about reading the ancient philosopher, I wanted to experience the pleasure myself. I found a copy of the Apology and have been hooked on Plato ever since. 

This, then, is the value of Closing. It can be read as a Culture War document. But Bloom intended it to be nothing less than a gateway drug to philosophy, literature and the examined life (plus a way to finance his Emma Bovary-esque spending habits). An appreciation of the book on this level can lead intellectual historians to do much more with it than they have by simply placing it in the context of the Culture Wars. Carrying Caroline Winterer's work into the second half of the twentieth-century, historians could examine Bloom's rhapsodic endorsement of Plato in terms of the reception and use of the Classics in America. One could fit Bloom into the postwar literary turn that Michael Kimmage describes, and examine him as one of several intellectuals, such as Vladimir Nabokov, Lionel Trilling, Edmund Wilson, and Peter Viereck, who found meaning in poetry and philosophy, as opposed to politics. Bloom also belongs in the anti-historicist tradition of his teacher, Leo Strauss. Writing that education is about satisfying erotic longing for completeness, Bloom complains in Closing that “the university does not see itself as ministering to such needs and does not believe the mummies on display in its museum can speak to the visitors or, horrors, go home to live with them.” (6) Here is the Bloom whose main concern is the tyranny of the living over the dead, and who belongs in an intellectual tradition that transcends the Culture Wars and the “Great Books” debates. 

In American Nietzsche, Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen has demonstrated how historians could examine Bloom in new contexts. Placing him in an American intellectual tradition that far transcends the Culture Wars, she reveals Bloom “enacting an American way of knowing Nietzsche, or an Emersonian way of thinking.” (7) Indeed, in the tradition of Emerson, Closing contains fascinating thoughts on the fate of philosophy in America. “Contrary to the popular prejudice that America is the nation of unintellectual and anti-intellectual people, where ideas are at best means to ends,” Bloom argues, “America is actually nothing but a great stage on which theories have been played as tragedy and comedy.” “This is a regime,” he continues, “founded by philosophers and their students. All the recalcitrant matter of the historical is gave way here before the practical and philosophical ought to be, as the raw natural givens of this wild continent meekly submitted to the yoke of theoretical science.” (8) Bloom, therefore, is valuable to U.S. intellectual historians for his understanding of the relationship between ideas, intellectuals, and democratic society in America, as well as his views on the role of educational institutions, such as the university, and cultural institutions, such as music and the family, in negotiating this relationship. “This is the American moment in world history,” Bloom concludes his book, “the one for which we shall forever be judged. Just as in politics the responsibility for the fate of freedom in the world has devolved upon our regime, so the fate of philosophy in the word has devolved upon our universities, and the two are related as they have never been before.” (9)
Historians can, and should, criticize Closing. We can, and should, oppose Bloom's sexist conviction that women are bound by nature, while the purpose of education, for men, is to overcome nature. We can scrutinize his arguments in favor of a core curriculum founded upon the Western cannon. And, of course, we can bristle at his critique of pop music (I write this while listening to Exile on Main Street). But historians should not dismiss this book; nor should they reduce it to a Culture War document. In a recent article, David C. Engerman argues that historians should broaden the intellectual context of the Cold War, in order to understand certain figures as intellectuals in the Cold War, instead of “Cold War intellectuals,” whose work is reducible to reigning U.S. geopolitical concerns. Similarly, Closing may be a key document in the Culture Wars, but it is so much more than a “Culture War book.” We remain under the shadow of the Culture Wars until we can broaden Bloom's intellectual context and tap the full potential of this remarkable book.

After my first read of Closing, I sought out one of my professors, who had been a student of Bloom, to ask what the man was like, explaining that I was deeply moved by his best-seller. I will never forget my professor's response: “Hmm, so it still works,” he said simply, suggesting that Bloom's ability to inspire undergraduates to pursue the examined life— or at least to read literature and philosophy—survives him. When I left the U.S. Intellectual History Conference panel, where attendees went to court about Bloom's wisdom, and connected with visitors at the Met over the life and death of Socrates, I continued Bloom's true legacy. The Closing of the American Mind did not make me stop listening to the Stones, but it has inspired me to read Plato, Rousseau, Tolstoy, Stendhal, Flaubert, and Shakespeare, to connect with friends and strangers in pursuit of new ideas, and to think creatively about justice, virtue, the good life, and, indeed, about how historians conceive of intellectual context. 

Notes

1. Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster Paperbacks), 1987, 136.

2. Bloom, 114

3. Bloom, 329.

4. Bloom, 133.

5. Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, Marianne Cowan, trans. (United States: Regnery Publishing, Inc.), 1962, 23-24.

6. Bloom, 136.

7. Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, American Nietzsche (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 2012, 312.

8. Bloom, 97.

9. Bloom, 382.

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

Tim's Light Reading (10/11/2012)

1 (of 5). Shocks v. Non-Shocks

At Notes From Ironbound, Werner Herzog's Bear posits that there are two categories among employed academics, "shocks" and "non-shocks." WHB then discusses the implications of their experience (i.e. "the experential divide") in the profession. What do you think? Does this divide exist, as described by WHB? How would you modify the story? What does this mean for intellectual historians?

2. Reading "The Great Books" Of Philosophy

Check out James Garvey's discussion and survey, at Talking Philosophy, of philosophers (and intellectual historians, if he only knew it) on which of "the great books" of philosophy they have actually been read cover-to-cover. For my part, I've read six. Although that seems low in relation to the list, my results match up well with a great many of those surveyed. How many have you read? And does the full reading of these works actually matter, for either philosophers or intellectual historians? Is there a philosophy canon? Should there be one?

3. Husserl in America

The "___X___ in America" meme has the potential to be endless and tiring, but I think this paper on "Husserl's Phenomenology in America," by Richard Lanigan, will be of interest to USIH readers. I've never seen a tracing of Husserl's influence on twentieth-century philosophy and intellectual life in the United States, and Lanigan's piece will perhaps start that line of literature. Which American philosopher or intellectual was most influenced by Husserl? Or are there any?

4. Hobsbawm Obits

In case you missed them, here are three that merit your reflection. And don't forget Andrew Hartman's reflections on Hobsbawm's influence on him (especially Genovese's review of Hobsbawm's Age of Extremes. Since that book introduced me to Hobsbawm, here's a passage on it from the Jacobin Obit:

Hobsbawm’s final addition to his ["Age of..."] series, The Age of Extremes (1994), on the “short twentieth century,” was written in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union. As Perry Anderson noted, the bourgeoisie as such nearly altogether fell out of the picture in this volume. Instead, the big theme was that of Communism, by chastening bourgeois hegemony, saving Western states from the excesses of divisive capitalism. This, the defeat of Nazism, and the Soviet Union’s ultimate rationality in helping to keep the Cold War mostly cold, was for Hobsbawm the historic justification for Communism. As a positive alternative to capitalism, however, it had proven to be a dead end. Notoriously, however, he told an interviewer that had Stalinism proven to be the fount of a new, higher civilization, its body-count would have been justified.

5. Ratner-Rosenhagen at the Chicago Humanities Festival

Next week I plan to post my review of American Nietzsche. As a preview, or lead-in, you should know that Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen will be presenting on her book at the Chicadgo Humanities Festival on Saturday, November 10. Details here. Let me know (timothy.n.lacy-at-gmail.com) if you're thinking about going as I'm working on trying to attend.