American Nietzsche

Stranger in a Strange Land

By THOMAS MEANEY, Wall Street Journal [Review of American Nietzsche
By Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen Chicago, 452 pages, $30]

As a teenager, Friedrich Nietzsche was fascinated by America. "The American way of laughing does me good," he wrote after reading "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer," "especially this sort of sturdy seaman like Mark Twain." In the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson he discovered a "brother-soul" who kindled his lifelong passion for truth-seeking. Despite making his name as the greatest anti-democratic thinker of his age, Nietzsche believed that America was a land of free spirits, unburdened by the weight of the European past.

American readers, for their part, have repaid Nietzsche's attentions. More than any other European thinker, he is alive in our cultural bloodstream. But in a country that, from the start, elevated the values of efficiency and equality over the virtues of aristocratic excellence, Nietzsche's message was bound to mutate. We have blunted his challenge to "create yourself" into a commercial catchphrase; we prefer to "like" our fellow citizens rather than to love or hate them; we don't hesitate to declare any child who dabbles in crayons an "artist." As a culture, we have given Nietzsche a happy ending.

What does our use and abuse of Nietzsche's thinking say about us? This is the interesting question that Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen sets out to answer in "American Nietzsche," her elegant and revealing account of America's reckoning with the German thinker. She samples the gamut of responses to Nietzsche in an effort to explain how nearly every segment of American culture "discovered in Nietzsche a thinker to think with."

For American thinkers wrestling with the anxieties unleashed by living in a pluralist democracy, Nietzsche not only diagnosed the mentality more acutely than anyone else but for his careful readers—those with "a third ear"—also promised forms of higher fulfillment.

For Nietzsche, as for Emerson, the source of this fulfillment was to be found in a radically new conception of the individual. The self was not a stable entity for Nietzsche, nor was there any "true self" to be discovered. Rather the self is something that we are constantly becoming. "We shed our old bark, we shed our skins every spring," Nietzsche writes, "we keep becoming younger, fuller of future, taller, stronger." We construct ourselves by assembling our experiences, desires and actions in the way a novelist gives coherence to the incidental plot points of a novel. "Make your own Bible!" declares Emerson. For both Nietzsche and Emerson the point was to generate meaning through a continuous act of self-creation.

Nietzsche's first American popularizer was the journalist H.L. Mencken, who was drawn to Nietzsche's European exoticism. Nevertheless, Mencken understood clearly enough that the self-created individuals that Nietzsche described could never arise easily in a democracy, where the self-creation of one citizen inevitably treads on the self-creation of another. In his 1908 book, "The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche," Mencken excoriated the way that American mass society trampled on the possibility of unadjusted heroes. "It is only the under-dog . . . that believes in equality," he seethed, "it is only the mob that seeks to reduce all humanity to one dead level, for it is only the mob that would gain by such leveling."

Mencken reviled American culture for not producing more genuine artists to match their European counterparts. "The culture of the Renaissance raised itself on the shoulders of a group of a hundred men," Nietzsche wrote, and it was such a cultural avant-garde that Mencken aimed to cultivate.

Mencken's columns put Nietzsche's name on the American cultural map, and the philosopher's ideas provoked murmurs of enthusiasm among a coterie of readers. But Nietzsche's reputation never got off the ground with the general public in the early decades of the 20th century. The first reason was the sensational trial, in 1924, of Leopold and Loeb, who kidnapped and murdered a 14-year-old boy, apparently under the influence of Nietzsche (or so claimed Clarence Darrow, Loeb's defense attorney). The second, more significant, reason was the rise of fascism in Europe.

It was one thing for American intellectuals and academics to invoke Nietzsche in their criticism of liberal democracy when its values seemed to be secure, but it was a considerably less welcome exercise in the 1930s, when those values were on the defensive. In the lead up to the war with Germany, Nietzsche's philosophy became hopelessly conflated with Nazism, though this association was the result of superficial reading. (Anti-Semitism, for instance, was one of Nietzsche's favorite examples of German stupidity.)

It was left to the German émigré and Princeton professor Walter Kaufmann to rehabilitate Nietzsche's reputation after World War II. In the best chapter of her book, Ms. Ratner-Rosenhagen explains how the Nietzsche we encounter in print today is largely Kaufmann's Nietzsche—mediated by his translations, collations and introductions. Kaufmann became not only Nietzsche's tireless promoter but also, to a degree, the sanitizer of his thought.

By arguing for Nietzsche's place in the Western canon alongside Kant and Hegel, Kaufmann made his subject respectable enough for the college classroom. He was also responsible for recasting Nietzsche as the forerunner of the various strains of existentialism that came into vogue in the 1960s. Nietzsche was suddenly a cultural touchstone with disciples ranging from Hugh Hefner to the Black Panther Huey Newton (the latter apparently misunderstood what Nietzsche meant by "slave morality" and thought it might be a good thing).

If there is a problem with "American Nietzsche," it is that Ms. Ratner-Rosenhagen is not quite up-front about the story she is telling. She claims at the outset that her study "is not even a book about Nietzsche"—and that, in the spirit of her subject, she will be merely presenting us with a series of interpretations in order to understand Nietzsche's "role in the ever-dynamic remaking of modern thought." But the last chapter of her book shows her to be partial to a very particular way of reading her subject. The chapter is devoted to three American Nietzscheans—Harold Bloom, Stanley Cavell and Richard Rorty—who all rediscovered American transcendentalism through Nietzsche and whose inclusion at the end of the book makes Nietzsche's thought seem like a long detour on the way back home to Emerson.

But Messrs. Cavell and Rorty have domesticated Nietzsche in peculiar ways, often sidestepping the main difficulties he presents. 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. Nietzsche's two great contributions to American culture, according to Rorty, were that he provided us with an example of how we can all make an art of our private lives and that he showed us that the truth, far from having any absolute value, is simply whatever we find useful. When it comes to our democratic foundations, Rorty advises that we cheerfully embrace our lucky political inheritance, which we only risk squandering by interrogating too closely.

It would be nice if it were all that easy. But one of Nietzsche's major claims was, after all, that some of us will always rebel against the leveling effect of liberal democracy, while others—most of us—will join the herd. Likewise, Nietzsche thought that the truth was rarely ever useful. He thought errors, disasters and profound misunderstandings were much more precious.

Still, there is something to be said for the happy ending America has given Nietzsche. A country that can translate the striving of the Nietzschean superman into a guide for democracy's self-creating everyman may have discovered a rare kind of philosophical agility. The shift may not be quite fair to Nietzsche, but then he was always thrilled by America's powerful misreading of the European past.

—Mr. Meaney is a doctoral student in history at Columbia and a co-editor of the Utopian.
Copyright 2011 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved