Children of Nietzsche

Fulford: Carving a Nietzsche
Robert Fulford Jan 24, 2012 – 8:00 AM ET | Last Updated: Jan 24, 2012 11:44 AM ET


Whether we like it or not, “We continue to live within the intellectual shadow cast by Nietzsche.”
Friedrich Nietzsche is one of those philosophers you just can’t kill.

He’s been in his grave since 1900, having been silenced by insanity many years before. In 1898, The New York Times ran an article headed, “Interesting Revolutionary Theories from a Writer Now in the Madhouse.” He’s read, as he was then, only by a small minority, many of whom it would be flattering to call eccentric.

Nevertheless, he runs through our social bloodstream. Francis Fukuyama’s remark has the sound of truth: Whether we like it or not, “We continue to live within the intellectual shadow cast by Nietzsche.”

Our political leaders are Nietzschean heroes, fuelled by the will to power. In popular fiction and journalism we eternally reinvent the drama of Nietzschean characters who scorn tradition and prove their bravery by setting their own course, as he urged. Defiant originality is sanctified everywhere from art galleries to the business pages. Steve Jobs was perhaps the world’s most renowned Nietzschean character type.

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Nietzsche might recognize the tone of current American politics. In the Republican primaries politicians struggle against inherited dogma (big government) while Democrats pledge to fight the ideology they fear (capitalism). But of course both parties maintain a respect for Christianity that would make Nietzsche decide he had lived in vain.

We don’t know it but Nietzsche scripted many of our conversations, putting words in our mouths. When we talk about culture (the culture of this, the culture of that) we echo him. Anyone who discusses “values” (instead of, say, ethics) is talking Nietzsche-talk.

People who claim to be in a state of “becoming” are Nietzscheans, knowingly or otherwise. He believed (now everyone believes) that we are all constantly reconstructing ourselves. In Nietzsche there’s no such thing as a permanently stable personality.

He was the original culture warrior. He laid the foundation for the struggle between traditionalism and modernism, an enduring battle. The more important a tradition, the more he wanted to see it challenged.

Through his books and articles Nietzsche’s ideas conquered America just as American influence was conquering the world. How this event in intellectual history happened is the concern of American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas_ (University of Chicago Press), a first-class academic book by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, a University of Wisconsin historian.

Nietzsche seems formidable from a distance but turns out to be surprisingly easy to read. That’s deceptive, because understanding him is hard. He’s endlessly, infuriatingly contradictory. One day he leaves us in despair about the future of humanity. On another he says the potential for liberated humanity is limitless. His tone ranges from insistent to hysterical.

Not everyone likes it. In fact, he’s as often despised as adored. Casual cruelty runs through his work, above all in his belief that most people don’t count. He callously described the common “herd” of humanity.

Fascists liked him. Decades after Nietzsche’s death Hitler claimed him as a chum even though Nietzsche maintained that anti-Semitism was a stupid German fantasy. Sadly, his sister, Elizabeth Forster-Nietzsche, having inherited control of his reputation, let the Nazis use his name.

Nietzsche placed his biggest bet on the “higher man,” the overman or Übermensch, the superior being, often translated into English as Superman. That was the word Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster borrowed in the 1930s for their creation, Superman, the comic.

Allan Bloom, the author of The Closing of the American Mind, blamed Nietzsche for the emotional deadness and intellectual sterility of university students. They learned, too easily and too soon, that God was dead and in fact they could set aside all intellectual traditions as calcified dogma, without bothering to understand them. In Bloom’s view Americans didn’t grasp the context and ended up accepting “nihilism with a happy ending.” If God is dead, relax.

Nietzsche’s great champion on this continent was H.L. Mencken, who at the age of 27 wrote the first book on Nietzsche in English. He loved the way his hero “hurled his javelin” at the authority of God and that he “broke from the crowd” of thinkers. After becoming the most famous American intellectual of the 1920s, Mencken admitted that his ideas were based on Nietzsche. “Without him, I’d never have come to them.”

The young Walter Lippmann, on his way to being the prince of political commentators, used Nietzsche’s example as a way of separating Americans from out-worn dogma in his book, _A Preface to Politics_ in 1913. Isadora Duncan, the founding genius of modern dance, claimed that “the seduction of Nietzsche’s philosophy ravished my being.” Emma Goldman, the legendary anarchist, said Nietzsche’s work took her to “undreamed-of heights.”

Jack London and Eugene O’Neill were among the major American writers who considered Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra their Bible. (“I will make company with creators, with harvesters, with rejoicers: I will show them the rainbow and the stairway to the Superman. I love him whose soul is lavish.”)

Ratner-Rosenhagen deals at affectionate length with the figure who most inspired Nietzsche, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), the American philosopher, leader of the Transcendentalist movement, champion of individualism. Beginning at the age of 17, Nietzsche was a devoted reader of Emerson.

In Nietzsche’s library four volumes of Emerson essays were worn ragged, margins frequently filled with comments. Nietzsche saw Emerson as a sovereign among intellectuals who rejected inherited ideals and developed a new conception of individualism.

Ideas have pedigrees, even if they seem commonplace, even if they sound as if your grandfather might have invented them. Inevitably, however the pedigree becomes obscure once the idea is accepted.

Consider that Emerson wrote, “Every evil to which we do not succumb is a benefactor.” Nietzsche liked that. He underscored it and later wrote a version of it that has been endlessly quoted: “What does not kill me makes me stronger.” I’ve heard people say that without having any idea that it comes from a German philosopher. Later, a thousand magazine articles developed the idea that our defeats, by teaching us, eventually produce victories.

In the 1970s, when the magazine where I worked went out of business, my father-in-law consoled me with four words of Nietzsche-inspired street English. He said I should remember what sensible people say when failure happens to them: “Every knock, a boost.”

So there we were, doing what someone else is no doubt doing at this moment, recovering from disaster under Nietzsche’s inescapable shadow.