Review: Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen’s American Nietzsche

In his 1987 best-selling book The Closing of the American Mind, Alan Bloom sounded the alarm that moral relativism had infected America's great universities and was "impoverishing the souls of today's students". And it was Friedrich Nietzsche who first introduced this destructive philosophy to America's shores.  Nietzsche has been an intellectual force in American culture since the beginning of the 20th century, and his influence is still felt today.  In the current presidential campaign American higher education has come under attack for indoctrinating students with (Nietzschean) moral relativism and robbing impressionable youth of their faith with (Nietzsche's) God is Dead atheism. 

In her lively book American Nietzsche Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen traces Nietzsche's profound influence on both academic thought and popular culture from H.L.Mencken to Alan Bloom and beyond.  Chapter after chapter she shows how Nietzsche became a lens for Americans to attempt to make sense of the modern world – a place where the foundations had crumbled and Americans searched for meaning in a world without clear moral signposts. 

Ratner-Rosenhagen shows that there has always been something of a symbiotic relationship between Nietzsche and America, for it was his reading of Ralph Waldo Emerson that gave Nietzsche the courage to embark on his journey as an independent writer and thinker.  And it was Emerson who showed the young Nietzsche a path – Ratner-Rosenhagen calls it "anti-foundationalism" – beyond the good and evil of Christian piety, culminating in Zarathustra.  And, while Nietzsche was more or less shunned by the academic establishment in Germany, he received early enthusiastic praise from readers in America (where German was still widely spoken and read in academic circles). 

After Nietzsche's death, the first English translations appeared, and the myth of the suffering  genius captured the imagination of American intellectuals.  The arrival of Nietzsche's work coincided with a new era in America, where the authority of religion was beginning to wane. Yet theologians and Christian writers knew they had to engage with the texts of the German philosopher; here was a force to be reckoned with.  Liberal protestants found much to admire in Nietzsche's pragmatism, even as they rejected his moral relativism. Catholic thinkers found in Nietzsche a "bitter tonic", and embraced his attack on pious, "feminized" protestantism.  Anarchists such as Emma Goldman were inspired by his "transvaluation of all values" (Umwertung aller Werte) which upended the old, unjust, order, while social critics such as H.L.Mencken used Nietzsche as a weapon against the philistine "booboisie" who ruled the American establishment.

But it was with Nietzsche's concept of the Übermensch that his work caught on with the broader American public.  In 1924 two University of Chicago students, Loeb & Leopold, believing themselves to be Nietzschean "Supermen" committed the "perfect crime" in murdering a 14-year old boy.  At the murder trial the famous defense lawyer Clarence Darrow may well have saved the young men from the electric chair by invoking the "Nietzsche defense" – the German philosopher had poisoned their minds with his amoral teachings. 

What is rather astonishing is that Nietzsche's hold on America remained relatively undiminished despite two wars with Germany where the philosopher was cast as a supporting actor.  The Great War was seen by many as the "Euro-Nietzschean War", with Germany attempting to embody the Übermensch on a national scale. Things were much worse during the Third Reich as the Nazi's attempted to appropriate Nietzsche as one of their own, with the perverse assistance of Nietzsche's sister Elisabeth Foerster Nietzsche.

After World War II, Nietzsche was rehabilitated in America thanks to the unflagging efforts of one professor at Princeton University – the German-American scholar Walter Kaufmann.  Thanks to Kaufmann's popular interpretations of Nietzche's works, the philosopher was cast as a proto-existentialist thinker.  Nietzsche became the filter for Sartre, Camus, and later, the Structuralists such as Foucault for American audiences. 

Towards the end of American Nietzsche, Ratner-Rosenhagen shows how the reception of Nietzsche in America had come full circle by the 1980s and 1990s, with thinkers such as Richard Rorty and Stanley Cavell finding through Nietzsche their way back to the American Pragmatists and to Emerson. 

Are we Americans done with Friedrich Nietzsche?  I think not. Just last summer the right-wing blogosphere erupted in an anti-Nietzsche frenzy after Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez told the press he was reading Zarathustra, while undergoing cancer treatment in Havana.