Ralph Waldo Emerson : Vision of Independence

There’s a treacherously placed bookstore in my neighborhood. To go almost anywhere from my apartment, I have to pass Walden Pond Books, and it’s next door to my usual coffee shop, so even if I didn’t decide to go in on the first pass, I probably will on the second. Many of the references in my own book, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, are ones that I encountered here, in books like Braiding Sweetgrass, Spell of the Sensuous, and The Genius of Birds. The influence is so strong that when I see my book at Walden Pond, I think of it as a mushroom that grew in the store.

This past October, I found myself in the store looking at a 1990 Vintage Books edition of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Essays. Not having read much Emerson before, even as an English major, I was quickly drawn into his writing about time and perception: nature was a “mutable cloud, which is always and never the same,” and the task was to “[detect] through the fly, through the fly, through the caterpillar, through the grub, through the egg, the constant individual; through countless individuals, the fixed species, through many species, the genus; through all genera, the steadfast type, through all the kingdoms of organized life, the eternal unity.” There was an acid-trip quality to it that I both recognized and admired.

Reading Emerson’s essays did not feel like reading other books. Later, when I tried to describe the experience to a friend, I asked, “Have you ever read a book that made you feel, like, drunk?” Emerson’s aphorisms are forceful, his cadences dizzying, his appeal to individual will seductive. Normally I am an orderly, chapter-per-day kind of reader, using up a pack of Post-it flags and then typing up the important quotes later. But my copy of Emerson’s Essays has only one Post-it flag, in the introduction by Douglas Crase (an Emerson quote: “It seems the one lesson which this miraculous world has to teach us, to the sacred, to stand aloof, and suffer no man and no custom, no mode of thinking to intrude upon us and bereave us of our infinitude”). After that, I lost my bearings. I was always just somewhere in the book, underlining and circling, hunched over, my face too close to the page.

I had been primed for Emerson’s vision of transcendence. A month earlier, I’d taken my yearly trip to the Elkhorn Slough National Estuarine Research Reserve, just north of Monterey, California. My ostensible purpose was to see the migrating shorebirds—including the sandpipers whose murmurous flocks contain more than a little of the transcendental—but it was also just to recover and hear myself think. I had never been much of a public person, and I’d been caught off-guard by the publicity around How to Do Nothing. I was soon buried under the pile of obligations and opinions that followed. At times, it felt like I no longer knew what my book was about, or what it was that I actually thought. I felt desperate for some kind of clarity.

After roaming the hills at Elkhorn Slough until the preserve closed at 5, I decided impulsively against going straight home. Instead I drove due east and, even though it was 100 degrees and I’d already been walking all day, started up a steep trail near Fremont Peak in San Juan Bautista. I was propelled by more than mere curiosity; I was trying to leave something behind. There was an unforgiving quality to the dry and tree-less hillside, with a hot wind that drew a rasping, rattling sound from the pods of alien-looking milk vetches. Both literally and figuratively, I felt I was gasping for air. When I reached the top of the trail, the sun was beginning to set on the Diablo Range across the valley, casting it in an otherworldly shade of purple. I was filled with a volatile mix of emotions. Sweat evaporating, I wrote in my notebook that “the pain I feel is the will trying to act” and that “the real self, let out of the cage, doesn’t want to go back in again.”

The “will” I wrote of was not exactly mine; it was an artist’s will, an out-of-range frequency to be listened for with great effort. Emerson’s Essays addressed and galvanized this self-as-listener, especially in “The Over-Soul.” I felt drawn to his theological model of self-abandonment and visitation, not unlike the way the writer Simone Weil described love and attention, or the way the painter Agnes Martin would wait, alone for days and weeks, for a vision of perfection. Emerson writes, “The soul gives itself, alone, original, and pure, to the Lonely, Original, and Pure, who, on that condition, gladly inhabits, leads, and speaks through it.” I recognized my own longing for absolute clarity, my own breathless hike, in Emerson’s description of an “ascension of state,” where “[w]ith each divine impulse the mind rends the thin rinds of the visible and finite, and comes out into eternity, and inspired and expires its air.”

“The Over-Soul” is my favorite essay, but Emerson is better known for “Self Reliance,” that famous paean to individualism. This is the one where Emerson declares that “[w]hoso would be a man must be nonconformist,” and disdains society as “a join-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater.” Again, the writing is seductive. For anyone adrift in the world, it is reassuring to hear that “[n]othing can bring you peace but yourself,” or that mental will can triumph over fate. It can really be this simple: “In the Will work and acquire, and thou hast chained the wheel of Chance, and shalt sit hereafter out of fear from her rotations.”

I was far from immune to this essay. I underlined “the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.” But the more I looked back on it, the more I began to wrestle with the essay’s blind spot. I didn’t immediately see it, because the blind spot was also my own.

The wrestling started when I went home for Thanksgiving. My family gatherings are small: my parents, my uncle, and I gather in my grandmother’s house, which is part of a community of small houses for the elderly. This year, as soon as we walked in the door, I was confronted with a dilemma. My mother immediately joined my grandma in the kitchen, whereas my dad went down the hall to a room where my uncle was sitting. When I asked my mom if they needed help in the kitchen, she shooed me away, so I headed down the narrow hallway to hover on the periphery of a conversation about the upcoming election primaries. This division will be all too familiar to many: women working in the kitchen, men talking politics in the next room.

As I leaned awkwardly against the wall because there wasn’t a third chair, the conversation continued as if I weren’t there. My gaze wandered over to an interesting tableau across the room. Resting on a shelf was something I’d never noticed: a copy of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, that favorite novel of libertarians. The main character is an uncompromising, iconoclastic, and self-made modernist architect who shared Emerson’s disdain for society and certainly followed his advice, to “suffer no man and no custom, no mode of thinking to intrude upon you and bereave you of your infinitude.”

Next to The Fountainhead was a careful pencil drawing of a black-headed gull in a frame. After staring at it for a few moments, I finally recognized this drawing as my own. I wondered why I would have drawn my grandmother a black-headed gull, an East Coast bird that I’d likely never seen, and then realized that I had drawn it years ago, before I had become a birder. I had likely been looking for a pleasant and generic subject for a drawing, googled “seagull,” and drawn one of the results, without distinguishing among them. (There’s technically no such thing as a “seagull,” only different kinds of gulls.)

Unexpectedly, everything congealed in that moment: the different rooms, the drawing, The Fountainhead, “Self Reliance,” and the critiques I had seen of How to Do Nothing. Just as I had studiously reproduced the form of the gull without knowing what it was, I saw that I had absorbed from my family and my upbringing a specific brand of individualism, valorizing and transmitting it unknowingly. I’d done this throughout my entire life, but especially in How to Do Nothing. Around my favored versions of contemplative solitude, so similar to Emerson’s, a whole suite of circumstances appeared in full relief, like something coming into focus. The women in the kitchen made the mens’ conversation possible, just as my trip to the mountain—and really all of my time spent walking, observing, and courting the “over-soul”—rested upon a long list of privileges, from the specific (owning a car, having the time), to the general (able-bodied, upper-middle-class, half white and half “model minority,” a walkable neighborhood in a desirable city, and more). There was an entire infrastructure around my experience of freedom, and I’d been so busy chasing it that I hadn’t seen it.

Just the night before, I had watched Astra Taylor’s Examined Life, a series of interviews in different locations with contemporary philosophers. While the documentary’s other subjects appear alone, Judith Butler takes a walk around the Mission District of San Francisco with Sunaura Taylor, an activist for disability and animal rights. Taylor was born with arthrogryposis and uses a wheelchair. At one point, Butler says, “I’m just thinking that … nobody goes for a walk without there being something that supports that walk outside of ourselves. And that maybe we have a false idea that the able-bodied person is somehow radically self-sufficient.”

                                              Clip from Examined Life

Taylor, whose condition affects the use of her hands, tells Butler about the time she lived in Brooklyn and would have to sit in a park for hours psyching herself up to get coffee alone. “In a way it’s a political protest for me to go in and order a coffee and demand help,” she says, “simply because, in my opinion, help is something that we all need.” After they stop into a vintage store to get Taylor a sweater because it’s gotten chilly, Butler revisits this story:

       My sense is that what’s at stake here is really rethinking the human as a site of interdependency. And I think, you know, when you walk into the coffee shop … and you ask for the coffee, or you, indeed, even ask for assistance with the coffee, you’re basically posing the question, do we or do we not live in a world in which we assist each other? Do we or do we not help each other with basic needs? And are basic needs there to be decided on as a social issue and not just my personal, individual issue or your personal, individual issue? So there’s a challenge to individualism that happens at the moment in which you ask for some assistance with the coffee cup. And hopefully, people will take it up and say, yes, I, too, live in that world … in which I understand that we need each other in order to address our basic needs. And I want to organize a social, political world on the basis of that recognition.

This conversation came back to me in that little house at Thanksgiving. My grandmother, otherwise healthy, had been recently diagnosed with Parkinson’s. After we all assembled in the living room, she showed me the medical alert device (also known as a “panic button”) hanging around her neck, and pointed to a small console in the corner of the room that would contact my parents if she pressed the button. Weeks earlier, she had fallen in this same living room and, unable to move or reach the phone, lay on the floor for many hours until my dad came by for his regular visit.

    

My immediate reaction to her story and to the button was one of terror at the contingency of the whole thing. It made my grandma seem uniquely dependent. But as I reflected on the panic button in the context of Butler’s “challenge to individualism,” it began to look more like an advanced, concrete version of an interdependence that we each bear in some form from the moment we are born. If my grandma was now hanging on by this particular thread, it simply highlighted the many other threads that keep us all aloft. It was also an intense physical illustration of the way that freedom is constrained by factors outside of one’s control—the very “wheel of Chance” Emerson thought we could afford to ignore.

In 1930, James Truslow Adams, the writer who coined the term “American dream,” wrote an essay called “Emerson Re-read,” in which he tried to account for why Emerson’s essays enchanted him as a youth but felt hollow for him as an adult. This image of independence just feels too easy, he says, noting that “economic evils trouble our sage not at all.” Adams suggests that Emerson’s self-reliance was part of an optimistic current in American thought that went hand in hand with material abundance and westward expansion. Indeed, “Self Reliance” was written five years before the term “manifest destiny” was coined, an era that celebrated the lone, able explorer setting out to tame a (supposed) wilderness. The contemplative tradition has often been supported from the outside, a hallmark of the affordances of leisure—the way that philosophy in ancient Greece was dependent on a servant class. The concept of self-reliance has always relied on something else.

None of this is to say that “Self Reliance” isn’t useful as a model of refusal and commitment. In his own time, Emerson was an outspoken opponent of slavery, the Mexican-American War, and the removal of Native Americans from their land. In our time, we could surely use the reminders to examine our relationship with public opinion and to maintain a sense of principled intuition. The best version of Emerson’s individualism is bracing, like a splash of cold water to the face, or a friend shaking you by the shoulders in order to snap you out of a daze. But for me, as for many others, everything outside the self fades away too quickly in “Self Reliance”: all of the people and circumstances that have influenced my experience of independence, my conception of my self, and even the very terms with which I think. It hides the losses that appear as my gains. And by placing the will so high above circumstance, it projects an untruthful image of equal opportunity in which the unfortunate should have just tried harder.

The tensions between agency and situation, between the individual and the collective, have never been easy to resolve. I’m trying to learn to live in the messy space between. Here, you can be both your own and not your own, responsible to communities without exhibiting the dreaded groupthink, and bound by one commitment: to examine your commitments, forever. Sometimes—many times—I’m wrong. And when I am, that is a time for listening to others, not for “keep[ing] with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.” I’m reminded of an archaic form of the noun “reliance,” where it means the opposite of a dependent; a reliance was someone on whom you depended. When I examine my identity, I do see an inalienable spirit grasping for infinity. But in the very same place, I also see an intersection of historical and cultural vectors, held up by a web of countless reliances.

 Emerson’s writing contains a version of the self-not-self paradox, even if it’s with eyes directed upward and inward, not outward. After all, besides “Self Reliance,” the other thing he’s most associated with is the philosophy of transcendentalism, which can entail a transcending of the self as much as it does transcending society. This is the stuff that made me feel drunk, where the boundaries of the self are breached in a meeting with something else. In “The Over-Soul,” “[o]ur being is descending into us from we know not whence … I am constrained every moment to acknowledge a higher origin for events than the will I call mine.” In “Circles,” the universe is “fluid and volatile”; the soul “bursts over that boundary on all sides”; and the heart “refuses to be imprisoned; in its first and narrowest pulses, it already tends outward with a vast force, and to immense and innumerable expansions.” In “History,” an individual is not a single entity but “a bundle of relations, a knot of roots, whose flower and fruitage is the world.”

When Emerson writes that “[t]houghts come into our minds by avenues which we never left open, and … go out of minds through avenues which we never voluntarily opened,” it almost sounds like he’s describing that day at Walden Pond Books, when the Essays found their way into my unsuspecting hands. I think of my book-mushroom growing there, the “flower and fruitage” of my encounters so far. It’s a story that belongs both to me and to my reliances. I will keep coming back to the store, retreating to the mountain, having conversations, sitting alone, tracing a path that is more a spiral than a straight line. And hard as I might work, I will be anything but self-made.

The Myth of Self-Reliance. By Jenny Odell. The Paris Review, January 15, 2020

During Harvard University’s commencement week in 1837, Ralph Waldo Emerson took the podium at the annual meeting of the Phi Beta Kappa society. The group, composed of the top students in the graduating class, was gathered in the First Parish Church in Cambridge. Emerson, the class poet of his own Harvard class a decade before, and a writer and philosopher of growing stature, had been chosen as the honored guest to address the future intellectual elite of New England. 

The event was a capstone in a week of ceremony and tradition. That changed when Emerson began to speak.

In his speech, titled “The American Scholar,” Emerson called for the young country to develop a national intellectual life distinct from lingering colonial influences. He also delivered an incisive critique of his audience, condemning academic scholarship for its reliance on historical and institutional wisdom. The eponymous scholar, he argued, had become “decent, indolent, complaisant.” To become more than “a mere thinker, or, still worse, the parrot of other men's thinking,” a scholar must begin to engage with the world for oneself.

Emerson was an unlikely critic of the country’s intellectual establishment. The son of a Unitarian minister, he had attended Harvard Divinity School and taken a position after graduation as a junior pastor at Boston’s Second Church. But the loss of his young wife to tuberculosis shortly after his ordination—just 16 months into their marriage—had shaken the foundation of his faith, and he had begun to chafe against the restrictions of institutionalized knowledge.

A similar frustration with New England’s dominant religious and academic culture was growing among many of the region’s other young intellectuals. In 1836, Emerson had joined a handful of them in founding the Transcendental Club. As Emerson laid out in his essay “Nature,” published the same year the club began, the transcendentalists sought freedom from the “poetry and philosophy of … tradition” and “religion by … history.” They believed that moral truth should be sought not in accepted wisdom, but through individual thought and experience.

With “The American Scholar,” Emerson gave voice to the movement’s individualism: envisioning an independent American intellectual culture premised not on any kind of nationalist pride—nor on any particular doctrine or political system—but on a dedication to independence itself. He would later define the “American idea” he sought to promote through his work simply as “Emancipation.”

The speech elicited praise from many of Emerson’s fellow transcendentalists and anger from the Harvard administration; after giving a similarly critical address at the divinity school the following year, he was banned from speaking on campus for three decades.

But “The American Scholar” had made its mark. Emerson’s speech left a particular impression on two members of the Harvard community, a troublemaking undergraduate named James Russell Lowell and a recent alumnus named Oliver Wendell Holmes.

“The Puritan revolt had made us ecclesiastically and the Revolution politically independent, but we were still socially and intellectually moored to English thought,” Lowell later wrote, “till Emerson cut the cable and gave us a chance at the dangers and the glories of blue water.”

Holmes called the speech America’s “intellectual Declaration of Independence.”

Emerson’s appeal for cultural independence coincided with the nationwide struggle toward another kind of emancipation. As transcendentalism began to take root in New England, abolitionism was gaining fervor across the Northern states. The debate over slavery seeped into churches, literature, and colleges, dominating conversations about America’s future.

Though he was initially hesitant to speak publicly about slavery, by the 1840s Emerson came to believe that American culture could be used to advance the cause of emancipation. He wasn’t alone: His view was shared by many other transcendentalists and prominent New England abolitionists. In May 1857, he convened at the Parker House Hotel in Boston with several of them, including Lowell, Holmes, and the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Together they founded a magazine dedicated to advocating abolitionism and promoting American voices: The Atlantic Monthly.

The mission statement printed in the first issue of The Atlantic that November echoed Emerson’s expansive philosophy. The founders disavowed prejudice and promised to “be the organ of no party or clique,” and to pursue morality and truth no matter where they stemmed from or led to. They sought too to advance American writing and the “American idea” “wherever the English tongue is spoken or read”—a reflection of Emerson’s desire for a national intellectual identity that could transcend the country’s institutions and borders.

In his earlier work, Emerson had emphasized the importance of great American writers who could offer insight into national life and introduce readers to new moral truths. “We love the poet, the inventor, who in any form, whether in an ode or in an action or in looks and behavior has yielded us a new thought,” he wrote in 1844. “He unlocks our chains, and admits us to a new scene.” He saw the same potential in The Atlantic. He backed Lowell for the role of founding editor, believing that he would act as an effective guide for the publication rather than pander to its readers.

He also supported the choice to exclude bylines from early issues of The Atlantic, explaining, “The names of contributors will be given out when the names are worth more than the articles.” In fact, the magazine included the work of some of the nation’s most notable literary figures, many of them connected to Emerson through his work and his carefully cultivated intellectual circles.

As his influence had grown as a writer and lecturer, Emerson had helped inspire and support some of the 19th century’s best-known American writers. Primary among these young protégés was Henry David Thoreau, whom Emerson befriended in the late 1830s. He introduced Thoreau to transcendentalist ideas, encouraged him to begin writing journal entries and essays, and provided him land with which to conduct his experiment in simple living. In 1840, Emerson urged another friend and protégé, the journalist and women’s-rights activist Margaret Fuller, to publish Thoreau’s first essay in the Transcendental Club’s magazine, The Dial (a publication that Emerson also helped establish). Following Thoreau’s early death, in 1862, Emerson helped champion Walden and secure the book and its author vaunted positions in the pantheon of American literature.

In 1842, Emerson gave a lecture appealing for a distinctly American writer who could give voice to the yet “unsung” nation. In attendance was a 22-year-old Walt Whitman, who was determined to answer his call. “I was simmering, simmering, simmering,” Whitman later said. “Emerson brought me to a boil.”

In 1855, Whitman paid for his first collection of poetry, Leaves of Grass, to be printed at a local shop, and sent one of the first copies to Emerson. Emerson responded soon after with a laudatory letter. “I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed,” he wrote.

Inspired by the positive response, Whitman passed Emerson’s letter on to an editor at the New York Tribune and quickly paid to produce a second edition of Leaves of Grass. He printed a phrase from Emerson’s letter on the book’s spine: “I greet you at the beginning of a great career.”

Early issues of The Atlantic featured Whitman’s poetry and Thoreau’s essays, along with short stories from Louisa May Alcott, the daughter of Emerson’s close friend Bronson Alcott; Nathaniel Hawthorne, Emerson’s neighbor in Concord, Massachusetts; and Henry James, a friend of Emerson’s by way of his father. The community he had created would help establish the new magazine, and further his vision for a generation of American writers who could put the spirit of the young country into words.

Emerson’s vision of emancipation shone through in the magazine’s approach to slavery, women’s rights, and labor rights, among other topics, in the years that he served as a regular contributor. He himself became a leading voice for abolitionism in The Atlantic as the country entered the Civil War, making a passionate moral case that the nation could not survive unless slavery was extinguished.

In one of his most famous lectures, “American Civilization,” published in the magazine’s April 1862 issue, he reiterated his call for independence from the past. “America is another word for Opportunity,” he observed. “Our whole history appears like a last effort of the Divine Providence in behalf of the human race; and a literal slavish following of precedents, as by a justice of the peace, is not for those who at this hour lead the destinies of this people.”

He beseeched the government to abolish slavery immediately and permanently. After Abraham Lincoln issued a preliminary version of the Emancipation Proclamation six months later, Emerson hailed the measure as a “heroic” and “genius” step forward in the long fight for moral governance—a fight that would not end when slavery did, but that would continue to march toward ever greater political liberty.

In other essays for the magazine, he urged readers to seek their own freedom outside the bounds of politics. A measure of individual solitude, he wrote, was necessary for the endurance of society. He argued that power was derived from wisdom, and wisdom from the accumulation of personal experience. And the best personal experience was to be found walking in nature alone: nature that “kills egotism and conceit; deals strictly with us; and gives sanity.” Out of nature, he believed, could grow good and wise men; out of good and wise men, perhaps, a good and wise nation.

Published over the course of 50 years, his dozens of essays, poems, and lectures in The Atlantic were an encapsulation of the same vision of independence that he’d outlined in “The American Scholar” and that had, by the time he co-founded the magazine, earned him international recognition.

But while Emerson’s work was widely read in his time, none of his writing for The Atlantic—nor the hundreds of other essays, lectures, poems, and books he produced over the course of his career—has endured as popular reading in the way of contemporaneous works like Alcott’s Little Women or Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” The selections from Emerson’s expansive body of work that have found places on modern syllabi or in anthologies are, in the way of most literary classics, more often referenced than read. He remains perhaps one of the most cited American authors, but his words surface now mainly in the form of decontextualized aphorisms and inspirational quotes: “To be great is to be misunderstood,” or “Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.”

Reading Emerson’s essays, it’s not hard to understand why his words have found their most enduring currency in this form. As the literary critic Alfred Kazin observed in a July 1957 Atlantic article, “Emerson’s genius is in the sudden flash rather than in the suavely connected paragraph and page.”

His writing, on the scale of pithy phrases—or even of paragraphs or brief sections—can be eloquent, clear, moving. On the scale of whole works, however, he charts convoluted, snaking routes toward his point. He overuses rhetorical questions; he tends toward rambling tangents; he dwells overlong on obscure concepts and metaphors; he becomes mired in dense, verbose passages that are at best tangential to his core ideas.

And his ideas were often as convoluted as his writing. He enshrined individualism, urging readers to “trust thyself” rather than being drawn in by “the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages” or relying “on Property, or the … governments which protect it.” But he dismissed the idea of deep or lasting individuality, insisting that truth was ultimately universal and “within man is the soul of the whole … the eternal ONE.” He argued that society suppressed liberty and that “the less government we have, the better.” But he also asserted that “government exists to defend the weak and the poor and the injured party,” and called for the state to promote virtue and to protect and secure individual rights. He spoke out against the immorality of slavery and the forced removal of Native Americans. But he also espoused a belief in absolute racial hierarchy even decades after he became a vocal abolitionist.

Yet even these inconsistencies were consistent, in the broadest sense, with Emerson’s American idea. For him, emancipation was an eternal work in progress—dependent on an unlimited openness to change, and an endless accrual of new insights and observations. Over the course of a lifetime, he noted, any single person accumulates knowledge through successive years of education, experience, and imagination; over the course of many lifetimes, society en masse incorporates the knowledge of individuals into a broader understanding of the world. He regarded perfect understanding as unachievable, so to him, virtue lay not in achieving it but rather in trying to move closer to it—imperfectly, inconsistently, humanly, the only way it could be done.

In this way, his ideas persist at the very heart of American culture, largely decontextualized from any particular piece of his work.

“Emerson, by no means the greatest American writer .... is the inescapable theorist of virtually all subsequent American writing,” the Yale literary critic Harold Bloom wrote in a 1984 article for The New York Review of Books. “From his moment to ours, American authors either are in his tradition, or else in a countertradition originating in opposition to him.”

Even if Emerson’s most influential lectures and essays are no longer universally read, the works he helped bring to life—such as Thoreau’s Walden and Whitman’s Leaves of Grass—endure as cornerstones of the nation’s literature. His essays shaped a tradition of American essay-writing. His poetry gave rise to some of the country’s greatest poets: Emily Dickinson treasured a book of his verse; Robert Frost called him his favorite American poet. Even Hawthorne and Herman Melville, co-signers of The Atlantic’s founding manifesto who expressed reservations about the transcendentalist movement—what Melville once, after attending one of Emerson’s lectures, referred to as “myths and oracular gibberish”—committed a distinctly Emersonian individualism to the page with characters such as Hester Prynne and Captain Ahab.

Transcendentalism went on to inform subsequent generations of philosophical and religious thought, including the existential musings of Friedrich Nietzsche and the civil disobedience of Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. Though Emerson never ventured into the visual arts, he influenced the paintings of Georgia O’Keeffe and the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright.

“Great men,” Emerson wrote, “exist that there may be greater men.” So he set out to build a culture that could evolve beyond any one moment or person, even himself.

Emerson’s house in Concord is surrounded by more famous historical sites. About a mile to the north lies the reconstructed bridge where one of the first battles of the American Revolution was fought in 1775. To the south stretches the northern shore of Walden Pond, where Thoreau retreated to “live deliberately” for two years, beginning in the summer of 1845.

Between them, the boxy white house rises up from the edge of the Cambridge Turnpike like an afterthought, an unremarkable Federal-style structure distinguished from its neighbors only by two neat signs proclaiming it to be “The Home of RALPH WALDO EMERSON.” Of the hundreds of thousands of visitors who traveled to the town in 2018 seeking some insight into the nation’s history—and some resplendent fall foliage—just 3,000 stopped by to see the home.

Emerson purchased the house in 1835, in the early stages of his new career as a writer and lecturer. When he first moved in, he set out to cultivate a garden. He planted hemlocks when his oldest son was born; pine trees after delivering “The American Scholar”; a fruit orchard as his first collection of essays launched him into international fame.

“I am present at the sowing of the seed of the world,” he wrote in 1841. More than a century and a half later, by the side of the Cambridge Turnpike, some of the things he planted still grow.

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s American Idea. By  Annika Neklason. The Atlantic, November 28, 2019.

“Listen to me!  . . . Do not, above all confound me with what I am not.”  Friedrich Nietzsche’s plea, of course, was in vain. Even while alive but in a state of complete mental collapse, his sister began an egregious misappropriation of his writings.  She cultivated and perpetrated readings of Nietzsche sympathetic to German nationalism and anti-Semitism. This “German Nietzsche” as the avatar of the Aryan superman has generally collapsed, and after the fall of the Third Reich a reassessment of Nietzsche began.

In the latter part of the 20th century a wholly new interpretation has emerged. Nietzsche has become the avatar of a world without God and the prophet of postmodern relativism. In a great feat of intellectual alchemy, Nietzschean skepticism has been fused with Marxist social consciousness to produce Progressive gold.  What Harold Bloom calls “French Nietzsche” has swept through Academia and is now in its latter orthodoxical iterations.

Nietzsche has been described as a philosopher who is easy to read but difficult to understand. This is, at least in part, because of his seemingly fragmented and provocative aphoristic style and his disinclination to articulate any kind of philosophical system. He often appears to contradict himself, and he makes no attempt to reconcile his seemingly disparate views. Nietzsche as philosopher is, therefore, difficult to place into any kind of historical continuity and, in fact, he himself is often critical if not dismissive of the great philosophers of his age:  Jean Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, John Stewart Mill, Arthur Schopenhauer, and so on. At some point, many end up on the barb of his ruthless wit. And Nietzsche never even mentions Karl Marx by name, while routinely denouncing the emergent socialistic movements as resentful secular Christian heresies. Nietzsche has little unqualified good to say about individual modern philosophers—save one: Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Nietzsche loved Emerson from first to last. Nietzsche’s interest in and admiration of Emerson began when he was still a schoolboy and continued throughout his productive life. He studiously annotated and copied whole passages from German translations of Emerson’s essays. In 1884, Nietzsche described Emerson as, “a glorious, great nature, rich in soul and spirit” and pronounced Emerson to be, “the author who has been the richest in ideas in this century.”And commenting on a collection of Emerson’s essays, Nietzsche wrote: “Never have I felt so at home in a book, and in my home, as—I may not praise it, it is too close to me.” 

Nietzsche’s admiration of Emerson has been largely ignored by modern scholars, at least until quite recently. My own contention is simply this: understanding Nietzsche’s affinity for Emerson is not only essential in understanding Nietzsche, but it is a way of confronting our current psychological fragmentation and ideological isolationism.

Nietzsche’s identification with Emerson is elemental. Both Emerson and Nietzsche subscribe to a unified Heraclitan universe of perpetual change and conflict, what Nietzsche describes as a, “monster of energy  . . . eternally self-creating . . . eternally self-destroying,” a vast “play of contradictions” in what Emerson describes as a “series of balanced antagonisms.” This is Emerson’s “power and form,” Nietzsche’s “Dionysian and Apollonian,” or what he would eventually call “will to power.” A human being is then a force of nature, what Emerson calls, “a piece of the universe made alive” and human thinking, human consciousness itself is a natural phenomenon. All human ideas are expressions of various human life forms, and philosophy is essentially what Nietzsche calls, “a kind of atavism of the highest order.”And like all forms, human cultures and civilizations are sublimations of this paradoxical play of contrary and conflicting powers.

Both Nietzsche and Emerson emphasize the importance and integrity of the individual. This is not for some ideological or romantic reason but because it is only as individuals that we can know who we are and how reality works. “Nothing,” says Emerson, “is at last sacred, but the integrity of your own mind.” The individual is the locus of experience, and Nietzsche and Emerson are, above all, the most empirical of philosophers. What we can elementally know of reality we know firsthand as individuals, not as members of some group, nor by some explanation of reality received from others. What we can most importantly receive from others is not “instruction,” says Emerson, but “provocation”—and provocation is precisely what Nietzsche receives from Emerson.

Emerson, not unlike Nietzsche, articulates no systematic philosophy; he has no particular theory of history or of social or economic relations.  “Life,” for Emerson “is not intellectual or critical, but sturdy.” Emerson understands human thinking as the absorption of sense experience and its transformation by individual human consciousness, by what he calls “the fire of his mind.” Ideas are not merely human projections but experience transformed by the fire of thought; thinking is not so much the generation of ideas as it is the combustion of experience.

Nietzsche and Emerson are minds on fire; both inhabit a world of what Emerson calls “perpetual revelation.” “We stand before the secret of the world,” writes Emerson, “where Being passes into Appearance and Unity into Variety.” In such a dynamic understanding of reality, truth cannot so much be known, as it can be experienced or embodied. It is the scholar’s conceit to think of Nietzsche and Emerson as simply generating ideas and concepts to be analyzed by others.

We are, as Vedic thinkers have long affirmed, simultaneously observers and participants in reality; “We animate what we can,” says the “Hindoo of Concord,” “and we see only what we animate.” The nature of the reality we experience reflects the nature of who we are. This understanding of ourselves as simultaneously observers and participants is a key to understanding Nietzsche’s affinity with Emerson and key to understanding subsequent misreadings of both. Existence is neither a purely objective phenomenon nor a purely subjective one—but a dynamic of inner and outer forces. Existence is a poetic phenomenon.   

As powerful and helpful as human concepts are, we always risk being seduced by our own “ideals” (or, for Nietzsche, “idols”) and drawn away from what Nietzsche calls “reality as it is.” Emerson, from his seminal essay “Experience”:

  “The great gifts are not got by analysis . . .  We may climb into the thin and cold realm of pure geometry and lifeless science, or sink into that of sensation.  Between these extremes is the equator of life, of thought, of spirit, of poetry, – a narrow belt.”

Living on the equator of life is dealing with Nietzsche’s reality as it is, and it is the poet who best understands that we are creative beings in a creative universe. The poet, Emerson asserts, “stands among partial men for the complete man.” It is the poet who has the greatest power to “name” the world and who articulates and affirms the unity of seemingly antagonistic aspects. Fully understanding the limits of skepticism and analysis and the necessity of creativity is why Nietzsche refers to himself as, “an artistic Socrates.” Philosophizing itself is a creative act.

Understanding and accepting the poetic nature of existence requires accepting and confronting the limited nature of human knowledge. This is Nietzsche’s “tragic insight” or “tragic wisdom,” which is the most elemental truth of our existence. Tragic insight acknowledges ourselves as simultaneously observers and participants in reality. Simply analyzing or observing nature no matter how closely will not relieve us of our responsibility to confront paradoxical reality. We may break down reality into its pieces, but ultimately we live by wholes not parts; it is we who generate order and meaning from our experience.

It is precisely this human tendency to shrink from the poetic and tragic nature of existence and to confuse our ideas or interpretations of reality with reality, which informs both Emerson’s and Nietzsche’s criticisms of Christianity.  But even before Emerson’s controversial “Divinity School Address” at Harvard in 1838, Christianity as a whole comprehensive system, especially in Europe, was in decline. It would be Nietzsche, almost a half century later, who would best articulate the nature and consequences of this world historical event. Nietzsche would become the prophet of the death of God and the emergence of a kind of human being new to human history: the shallow, nihilistic last man.

When Emerson died in 1882, America was still somewhat of a frontier society, in Walt Whitman’s words, “a great poem” yet in the process of writing itself. Well into the twentieth century Emerson would come to seen as the philosopher of sunny optimism and individual self-realization, ultimately ignored or dismissed in the world of academic philosophy. 

Nietzsche’s Europe of this time was still an expanding imperial power, but it was also experiencing the beginnings of what would become its own civilizational disintegration. Nietzsche would become famous for his insights into the great transformations, which have come to define the modern world. He is, to this day, the “bad boy” of European philosophy, variously condemned by some as the prophet of decay and nihilism, while praised by others as the avatar of ferment and liberation. All the while, Nietzsche’s debt to Emerson has largely been forgotten. 

Understanding the nature of Nietzsche’s affinity for Emerson is to return to the powerful and persistent relevance of both. It is precisely the neglected Emersonian aspect of Nietzsche which signifies a return to observing and contemplating the spectacle of reality as a whole, as a vast unified play of forces of which we are always participants. A return to Emerson is a return to the integrity of the individual as the locus of experience and a turn away from our narrow, fragmented and increasingly dysfunctional ideologies and abstractions. A return to Emerson is a return to philosophy, a return to faith in our ability, not only to contemplate antagonistic forces, but to articulate how antagonistic forces interconnect and how we fit into the whole tragic spectacle. 

Nietzsche’s respect and admiration for Emerson persisted throughout his entire life because Nietzsche’s fundamental understanding of reality persisted: we are tragic beings in tragic universe. Commenting on the passing of Emerson, Nietzsche wrote: “In Emerson, we have lost a philosopher”

Nietzsche’s First Man: Ralph Waldo Emerson. By Chris Augusta.  Merion West ,  May 21, 2019.

Why Friedrich Nietzsche Is Misunderstood

It takes a strong philosopher to assume control of a preposition and propel it into a foreign language. That is what Friedrich Nietzsche did with the word über. In German, it can mean “over,” “beyond,” or “about.” You are reading an essay über Nietzsche. As a prefix, über is sometimes equivalent to the English “super”—übernatürlich is “supernatural”—but it has less of an aggrandizing effect. Nietzsche altered the destiny of the word when, in the eighteen-eighties, he began speaking of the Übermensch, which has been translated as “superman,” “superhuman,” and “overman.” Scholars still debate what Nietzsche had in mind. A physically stronger being? A spiritual aristocrat? A kind of cyborg? “Overperson” might be the most literal equivalent in English, although it is unlikely that DC Comics would have sold many comic books using that title.

In 1903, three years after Nietzsche’s death, George Bernard Shaw published his play “Man and Superman,” in which he equated the Übermensch with an overflowing “Life Force.” Three decades later, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, two Cleveland teen-agers, created the first “Super-Man” story, depicting the character not as a caped hero but as a bald, telepathic villain bent on “total annihilation.” Super-Man soon reëmerged as a muscle-bound defender of the good, and during the Second World War he jumped into the fight against the Nazis. It’s unclear whether Siegel and Shuster knew of Nietzsche in 1933, but the word “superman” hardly existed in English before the philosopher’s ideas began to spread.

As Nietzsche worked his wiles on generations of English-speaking college students, the word Übermensch increasingly stood on its own, and “über” slipped into English as a prefix. In the nineteen-eighties, Spy described the Hollywood agent Michael Ovitz as an “über-agent.” The umlaut-free car-sharing service Uber, originally known as UberCab, is a related development, hinting at Silicon Valley fantasies of world domination. In the late twentieth century, the word “super” rebounded into German as all-purpose slang for “very”; if you wish to describe something as really, really cool, you say that it is super super toll. Somewhere, Nietzsche is laughing hysterically while screaming in anguish.

The adventures of “super” and “über” are a case study in the inescapability of Nietzsche’s philosophy, which has affected everyday discourse and modern political reality like no body of thought before it. Countless books on Nietzsche are published in dozens of languages each year, linking him to every imaginable zone of life and culture. One can read about the French Nietzsche, the American Nietzsche, the pragmatic Nietzsche, the analytic Nietzsche, the feminist Nietzsche, the gay Nietzsche, the black Nietzsche, the environmentalist Nietzsche. Lurking amid the crowd of avatars is the proto-fascist Nietzsche—the proponent of pitilessness, hardness, and the will to power who is cited approvingly by such far-right gurus as Alain de Benoist, Richard Spencer, and Aleksandr Dugin. Can a philosopher who has sown such confusion be said to possess a coherent identity? Or, as Bertrand Russell once argued, is Nietzsche merely a literary phenomenon?

When I was in college, in the nineteen-eighties, the French Nietzsche held sway. It was the heyday of post-structuralism, and Nietzsche appeared to anticipate one of the central insights of that era: that we are at the mercy of ever-shifting systems and perspectives. The work of Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Jacques Derrida is all but inconceivable without Nietzsche’s example. So many professors distributed photocopies of the 1873 essay “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense” that we could have recited it as a postmodern pledge of allegiance: “What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms. . . . Truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are.”

In the past few decades, other Nietzsches have come to the fore. Anglo-American philosophers have aligned him with various schools of post-analytic thought, seeing him as an idiosyncratic kind of psychologist or sociologist. Nietzsche’s political thinking is also a trending topic, although his ideas are devilishly difficult to reconcile with modern conceptions of left and right. He raged against democracy and egalitarianism, but also against nationalism and anti-Semitism. Nietzsche is often quoted in the chat rooms of the far right, and he also surfaces regularly in leftist discussions about the future of democracy.

Walter Kaufmann, the German-American émigré whose translations of Nietzsche were long the standard versions in English, once declared that the philosopher’s writings are “easier to read but harder to understand than those of almost any other thinker.” Ideologues keep trying to appropriate him because they want his rhetorical firepower on their side. Yet Nietzsche, like his fallen idol Richard Wagner, is at once emphatic and ambiguous, overbearing and elusive. Nietzsche’s famous adage that there are “no facts, only interpretations” is among his more debatable propositions, but it applies perfectly well to his own infuriating, invigorating body of work.

The itinerant, solitary, sickly life of Nietzsche has been told many times, most recently in English by the biographer Sue Prideaux, in “I Am Dynamite!” The title comes from an unnerving passage in “Ecce Homo,” Nietzsche’s autobiographical book of 1888, which was completed a couple of months before he descended into insanity, at the age of forty-four:

    I know my lot. One day my name will be linked to the memory of something monstrous [etwas Ungeheueres]—to a crisis like none there has been on earth, to the most profound collision of conscience, to a verdict invoked against everything that until then had been believed, demanded, held sacred. I am no man, I am dynamite.

How a Lutheran pastor’s son, trained in classical philology, ended up on that precipice of brilliance and madness is the essential drama of Nietzsche’s life. The passage has been read as an eerie premonition of his future appropriation by the Nazis—although there is no way of knowing exactly what kind of crisis is meant. Ungeheuer is an ambiguous word, hovering between the monstrous and the gigantic. Kaufmann translated it as “tremendous,” which takes away too much of the ominousness. Here is the sumptuous difficulty of Nietzsche: when you drill down on a word, an abyss of interpretation opens.

Nietzsche grew up in the village of Röcken, outside Leipzig. The church where his father preached still stands; Nietzsche, the scourge of Christianity, is buried in a plot next to the building. The elder Nietzsche, like his son, was afflicted by severe physical and mental problems—violent headaches, epileptic strokes, amnesiac episodes—and died at the age of thirty-five, when Friedrich was four. Nietzsche himself had a mental breakdown in middle age. The old story that his breakdown stemmed from syphilis is now widely doubted; a likelier explanation is a hereditary neurological or vascular disorder. Neurologists in Belgium and Switzerland have concluded that he had cadasil, a genetic condition that causes repeated strokes.

“I Am Dynamite!” lacks the philosophical scope of prior biographies by Rüdiger Safranski and Julian Young, but Prideaux is a stylish and witty narrator. She begins with the pivotal event in Nietzsche’s life: his introduction, in 1868, to Wagner, the most consequential German cultural figure of the day. Nietzsche would soon assume a professorship in Basel, at the astonishingly young age of twenty-four, but he jumped at the chance to join the Wagner operation. For the next eight years, as Wagner completed his operatic cycle “The Ring of the Nibelung” and prepared for its première, Nietzsche served as a propagandist for the Wagnerian cause and as the Meister’s factotum. He then broke away, declaring his intellectual independence first with coded critiques and then with unabashed polemics. Accounts of this immensely complicated relationship are too often distorted by prejudice on one side or another. Nietzscheans and Wagnerians both tend to off-load ideological problems onto the rival camp; Prideaux succumbs to this temptation. She insists that Nietzsche’s talk of a superior brood of “blond beasts” has no modern racial connotation, and casts Wagner’s Siegfried as an Aryan hero who “rides to the redemption of the world.” In fact, Siegfried is a fallen hero who rides nowhere; the redeemer of the world is Brünnhilde.

Prideaux’s picture of the Wagner-Nietzsche relationship fails to explain either the intensity of their bond or the trauma of their break. Early on, Nietzsche was hopelessly infatuated with Wagner’s music and personality. He described the friendship as “my only love affair.” As with many infatuations, Nietzsche’s expectations were wildly exaggerated. He hoped that the “Ring” would revive the cultural paradise of ancient Greece, fusing Apollonian beauty and Dionysian savagery. He envisaged an audience of élite aesthetes who would carry a transfiguring message to the outer world. Wagner, too, revered Greek culture, but he was fundamentally a man of the theatre, and tailored his ideals to the realities of the stage. At the first Bayreuth Festival, in 1876, Nietzsche was crestfallen to discover that a viable theatre operation required the patronage of the nouveau riche and the fashionable.

Personal differences between the two men provide amusing anecdotes. Nietzsche made sporadic attempts at musical composition, one of which caused Wagner to have a laughing fit. (The music is not very good, but it is not as bad as all that.) Wagner also suggested to Nietzsche’s doctor that the young man’s medical issues were the result of excessive masturbation. But the disagreements went much deeper, revealing a rift between ideologies and epochs. Wagner embodied the nineteenth century, in all its grandeur and delusion; Nietzsche was the dynamic, destructive torchbearer of the twentieth.

When they first met, they shared an admiration for the philosophical pessimism of Arthur Schopenhauer, who saw a world governed by the insatiable striving of the will. Only through the renunciation of worldly desire, Schopenhauer posited, can we free ourselves from our incessant drives. Aesthetic experience is one avenue to self-overcoming—an idea that the art-besotted Nietzsche seized upon. But he disdained Schopenhauer’s emphasis on the practice of compassion, which also promises release from the grasping ego. Wagner, by contrast, claimed to value compassion above all other emotions. “Parsifal,” his final opera, has as its motto “Durch Mitleid wissend, der reine Tor” (“The pure fool, knowing through pity”). Nietzsche’s 1878 book, “Human, All Too Human,” his inaugural assault on Wagner and Romantic metaphysics, hammers away at the word Mitleid, considering it an instrument of weakness. In its place, Nietzsche praises hardness, force, cruelty. “Culture simply cannot do without passions, vices, and acts of malice,” he writes.

These views made Wagner wince, as the diaries of Cosima Wagner, his wife, attest. In an earlier essay entitled “The Greek State,” Nietzsche had declared that “slavery belongs to the essence of a culture.” The intellectual historian Martin Ruehl speculates that Wagner persuaded Nietzsche to omit the essay from his first book, “The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music” (1872), which culminates in a paean to Wagner. During the same period, though, Nietzsche was castigating German tendencies toward nationalist chauvinism and anti-Semitism—conspicuous elements in Wagner’s political blatherings. What seems particularly unfortunate about the break is that each man had an acute sense of the other’s blindnesses.

Nietzsche not only rejected the sublime longings of nineteenth-century Romanticism; he also jettisoned the teleology of historical progress that had governed European thought since the Renaissance, and that had found its most formidable advocate in Hegel. Instead, Nietzsche grounded himself in a version of naturalism—the post-Darwinian conviction that humans are an animal species, led by no transcendent purpose. This turn yields Nietzsche’s most controversial concepts: the announcement of the death of God; the “eternal return,” which frames existence in terms of endlessly repeating cycles; and the will to power, which involves a ceaseless struggle for survival and mastery. It might be said that Nietzsche, in backing away from Wagner, backed into his own mature thought—the celebration of Dionysian energy, the “triumphal yes to life over and above all death and change.”

Between his final meeting with Wagner, in 1876, and his mental collapse of 1889, Nietzsche lived the life of an intellectual ascetic. Health problems caused him to resign his professorship in 1879; from then on, he adopted a nomadic life style, summering in the Swiss Alps and wintering, variously, in Genoa, Rapallo, Venice, Nice, and Turin. He wrote a dozen books, of increasingly idiosyncratic character, poised between philosophy, aphoristic cultural criticism, polemic, and autobiography. He worked out many of his ideas during vigorous Alpine hikes—a practice fondly re-created by John Kaag in the recent book “Hiking with Nietzsche.” The possibility of a romance with the psychologist Lou Andreas-Salomé arose and then subsided; a serious relationship was probably beyond his reach. The landscape of the mind consumed his attention. As Safranski wrote, “For Nietzsche, thinking was an act of extreme emotional intensity. He thought the way others feel.”

Translating Nietzsche is a difficult task, but the swagger of his prose, with its pithy strikes and sudden swerves, can be fairly readily approximated in English. Kaufmann, in his translations, brought to bear a strong, pugnacious style. In his introductions and footnotes, he distanced Nietzsche from fascist bombast—naming the Übermensch the “Overman” was just one strategy—and recast him as a kind of existentialist. But Kaufmann underplayed Nietzsche’s slippery elegance, and his choice not to translate “Human, All Too Human” and its successor, “Dawn” (1881), gave a skewed view of the thinker’s development. A series of translations from Cambridge University Press covered the gaps. Now Stanford University Press is halfway through a nineteen-volume edition of Nietzsche’s complete writings and notebooks. The press has been threatened with cuts in funding, but if the project is achieved English readers will have, for the first time, access to the entirety of Nietzsche’s work.

Since 1967, the German publisher De Gruyter has been amassing a critical edition of Nietzsche’s complete writings, which can be browsed on a dizzyingly comprehensive Web site, nietzschesource.org. This monumental project has, to the annoyance of some scholars, attracted increasing attention to Nietzsche’s extensive notebooks. These show a less awe-inspiring side of the philosopher, as he jots down items from his reading and delivers utterances esoteric, mundane, and bizarre:

When five people speak together, a sixth always has to die.

The Chinese eat very many dishes in very small portions.

I could become the European Buddha.

If you aren’t a bird, be careful not to camp above an abyss.

Woman is so little satisfied with herself that she would rather permit herself to be beaten than—

The last thought is left blessedly unfinished. Nietzsche’s misogyny is a brute fact that no pageant of interpretation can disguise.

Yet the notebooks contain some of Nietzsche’s most vital, pungent writing. Consider a remarkable passage from 1885, which appears in the most recent Stanford volume, “Unpublished Fragments (Spring 1885–Spring 1886),” in a translation by Adrian Del Caro. It has long been known to readers as the final section of “The Will to Power,” Nietzsche’s posthumous so-called magnum opus, assembled under the direction of his reactionary sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, and published in 1901. To come across it in the Stanford edition, free of Förster-Nietzsche’s tendentious and often deceptive editorial practices, is a bracing shock:

            And do you also know what “the world” is to me? Should I show it to you in my mirror? This world: a colossus [Ungeheuer] of energy, without beginning, without end, a firm, unshakable magnitude of energy that does not get bigger, does not get smaller, that does not expend itself but only transforms itself, as a whole unchangeable in size, an economy without expenditures and losses, but likewise without growth, without income, encased by “nothingness” as by its border, nothing blurring, wasted, nothing infinitely extended, but laid into a definite space as a definite force, and not a space that would be “empty” anywhere, rather as force everywhere, as play of forces and waves of forces . . . this my Dionysian world of eternal self-creating, of eternal self-destroying, this mystery-world of the doubly voluptuous, this my beyond good and evil, without goal, if a goal does not lie in the happiness of the circle, without will, if a ring does not have good will for itself—do you want a name for this world? A solution for all its riddles? a light for you too, you hiddenmost, strongest, most intrepid, most midnightly?—This world is the will to power—and nothing else! And you yourselves are also this will to power—and nothing else!

The central sentence actually goes on for almost twice as long, disrupting the rat-a-tat rhythm that is typical of Nietzsche’s later writing. He generally resisted the epic long-windedness of nineteenth-century German prose, but here he makes an exception as he verbally acts out the condition of universal flux. An additional wrinkle is that the diction begins to resemble the ecstatic love duets of Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde” (“Without naming / Without parting / Newly knowing / Newly burning”). You could quibble with this or that choice in Del Caro’s rendering—the statuesque word “colossus” seems a poor choice for Ungeheuer—but the passage has the right racing, dancing energy.

No creature in Nietzsche’s menagerie of concepts has caused as much trouble as the will to power. At first glance, this entity strongly resembles Schopenhauer’s all-devouring will. For Martin Heidegger, the will to power was the last gasp of metaphysics—an attempt to capture the “basic character of all beings,” which Heidegger wishes to supplant with his post-metaphysical idea of being-in-the-world. Gilles Deleuze, the chief guru of the French Nietzsche, wrote, “The will to power is not force but the differential element which simultaneously determines the relations of forces (quantity) and the respective qualities of related forces.” One needn’t know exactly what Deleuze means here to accept the underlying proposition that Nietzsche understands power less as a struggle for domination over others than as a struggle for power over oneself. Rather than fleeing abjectly from the will, as in Schopenhauer, one should seek to harness it, master it, ride it out.

When Nietzsche revisits this material, in “Beyond Good and Evil” (1886), he pulls back abruptly, placing the will to power in a hypothetical, almost ironic frame. He begins, “Supposing nothing were ‘given’ as real besides our world of desires and passions . . .” After a series of qualifications, he concludes, “Supposing finally that we were to succeed in explaining our entire life of drives as the taking shape and ramification of a basic form of the will—namely of the will to power, as my proposition has it . . . then we would have earned the right to unequivocally determine all effective force as: will to power.” Nietzsche, for all his bravado, likes to hedge his bets, as Tom Stern points out in the introduction to “The New Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche.” He writes that the philosopher’s style is one of “rhetorical questions, ellipses, fables, mini-dialogues, hints that much is left unsaid, and apparent praise for seeming to be other than you are.”

This cyclone of nuance goes missing when we reduce Nietzsche to maxims. Nor should we try to extract a system that can be summarized on a chalkboard. Ultimately, his writing is a mode of criticism, of übersubjective intellectual reportage, grounded in extreme self-awareness. Freud is said to have commented that Nietzsche “had a more penetrating knowledge of himself than any other man who ever lived or was ever likely to live.”

Monsters lurk in the Nietzschean deep. It cannot be a random mishap that so many unpleasant people have taken pleasure in his work. None other than Jacques Derrida discouraged talk of “falsifications” of Nietzsche, fascist or otherwise. “One can’t falsify just anything,” Derrida wrote, with unaccustomed bluntness. (One can, in fact, falsify anything, as a glance at the morning paper shows, but the point holds.) However selective the Nazi appropriation of Nietzsche may have been, it replicated elements of his thought. He did write that equality is the “greatest of all lies,” and divided humanity into a hierarchy of the weak and the strong. Hans Stark, the head of the admissions detail at Auschwitz, had a sign over his desk reading “Mitleid ist Schwäche” (“Compassion Is Weakness”). This could be read as a crude condensation of Nietzsche’s diatribe against compassion in “The Antichrist.”

Ronald Beiner, in a new book entitled “Dangerous Minds: Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the Return of the Far Right,” claims that the resurgence of far-right political movements around the world is evidence of Nietzsche’s nefarious influence. His hostility to absolute truth, Beiner writes, has “left us vulnerable to harsh new ideologies that appear to regard respect for truth as a snare.” To be sure, a circuitous chain of connections is needed to get from “Thus Spake Zarathustra” and “Beyond Good and Evil” to Donald Trump’s ravings about “fake news” or the vicious fictions of Sandy Hook conspiracy theorists. Merely to announce a high regard for truth is no guarantee that truth will be uttered. Indeed, some of the most hideous acts in history have been committed by people who believe themselves to be in sole possession of absolute truth. In the American context, merchants of hatred hardly need to look to a nineteenth-century German philologist for inspiration: they can draw on older and deeper wells at home.

Beiner is right to urge latter-day interpreters to abandon talk of an apolitical Nietzsche, but he is arguing largely with a previous generation of scholars. There is no lack of contemporary publications that deal forthrightly with Nietzsche’s political thinking: these include Hugo Drochon’s “Nietzsche’s Great Politics,” Tamsin Shaw’s “Nietzsche’s Political Skepticism,” and Gary Shapiro’s “Nietzsche’s Earth: Great Events, Great Politics.” Stern catalogues Nietzsche’s most problematic traits in the “Cambridge Companion,” although he adds the caveat that “we must have more categories available to us than ‘Nazi/not-Nazi,’ ‘anti-Semite/anti-anti-Semite,’ ‘far-sighted/foolish’ or ‘to be attacked/defended at all costs.’ ”

A recurring theme in these studies is that Nietzsche could be a fiercely prescient analyst of democratic politics, and that we can learn from his observations without following him into antidemocratic invective. In an essay in the “Cambridge Companion,” Christa Davis Acampora writes, “A popular view of Nietzsche regards him as an advocate of bald expressions of power, but he is better understood as someone who investigates—rather than celebrates—power.” Who can deny that human beings are a fundamentally predatory species, and that no political system or moral code has yet tamed our worst impulses? Nineteenth-century thinkers in the tradition of Hegel anticipated the attainment of a perfected state of humanity; instead, as Nietzsche foresaw, a century of unprecedented horrors ensued. During the Cold War, the powers that defeated fascism brought the world to the brink of a nuclear war that would have made the Second World War seem like a minor episode in comparison. Today, anthropogenic climate change is causing mass extinctions. To quote Zarathustra: “The Earth has a skin, and this skin has diseases. One of these diseases is called, for example, ‘humanity.’ ”

Nietzsche’s central insight about the modern state—one that greatly influenced the sociology of Max Weber and the political thinking of Carl Schmitt—is that it faces a crisis of authority. When power is no longer divinely ordained, the right to govern is contested. In “Human, All Too Human,” Nietzsche predicted that, as the democratic state secularized itself, there would be a surge of religious fanaticism resistant to centralized government. On the other side, he anticipated a zealous adherence to the state on the part of nonbelievers. Religious forces might seize control again, engendering new forms of enlightened despotism—“perhaps less enlightened and more fearful than before.” These struggles could go on for a while, Nietzsche writes. In one long paragraph, he prophesies the history of the twentieth century, from fascism to theocracy.

To the opponents of democracy, Nietzsche says, in essence: Just wait. Liberal democracy will devour itself, creating conditions for authoritarian rule. Disorder and instability will sow distrust in politics itself. “Step by step, private companies will absorb the functions of the state,” Nietzsche writes. “Even the most tenacious remnants of the old work of governing (the activity, for example, that is supposed to protect private persons from one another) will finally be taken care of by private entrepreneurs.” The distinction between public and private spheres will disappear. The state will give way to the “liberation of the private person (I take care not to say: of the individual).”

And here we are, in the twenty-first-century world of laissez-faire economics and unregulated Big Tech monopolies. As the political philosopher Urs Marti has pointed out, Nietzsche sometimes sounds less like a proto-Nazi than like a neoliberal or a libertarian. A notebook entry from 1885-86 looks ahead to “a superior kind of human being that thanks to its preponderance of willing, knowing, wealth and influence, makes use of democratic Europe as its most pliable and flexible tool for taking the destinies of the earth in hand, for shaping ‘the human being’ itself as an artist would.” Silicon Valley tycoons strive to become just such übermenschlich innovators. The entrepreneur Peter Thiel, an avid reader of Nietzsche, says things like “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” In this light, Nietzsche’s opposition to nationalism and anti-Semitism looks less virtuous. For tech billionaires, national and racial hatreds are inconveniences; their authoritarianism wears a cosmopolitan face, promising frictionless commerce for all.

Is that what Nietzsche wants? His avoidance of the word “individual,” in favor of “private person,” suggests skepticism. And a crucial aspect of his world view militates against monopolistic power. In 1995, Lawrence Hatab published a fascinating book called “A Nietzschean Defense of Democracy,” which emphasizes the philosopher’s attachment to the Greek agon—competition among worthy adversaries, whether athletic or artistic. Hatab revisits that connection in an essay, in the “Cambridge Companion,” on the will to power. In Nietzsche’s reading, the Greek mentality abhorred the idea of an Alleinherrschaft, a “domination by one.” The Athenian institution of ostracism originated in the need to expel individuals who threatened the balance of power. As Hatab observes, the rite of the agon “rules out violence, because violence is actually an impulse to eliminate conflict by annihilating or incapacitating an opponent.” In “Ecce Homo,” Nietzsche writes, “I attack only a winner.” He goes after the most tyrannical, domineering forces—hence, his critiques of God and Wagner.

The relevance for the modern democratic state is clear. James Madison’s vision of constitutional checks and balances, of divided powers in equilibrium, is agonistic politics in action. When one entity gathers too much power, the system ceases to function. Nietzsche’s political philosophy would appear to hope for such an outcome, but in “Human, All Too Human” he performs a typical backtracking maneuver. Having forecast the death of the state, he adds, “To work toward the diffusion and realization of this idea is admittedly something else.” The enterprise could lead to “destructive experiments.” It is a good thing, then, that, in all likelihood, “the state will still persist for a good while yet.”

Behind Nietzsche’s array of extreme positions is a much less alarming belief: that the only healthy state for humanity is one in which rival perspectives vie with one another, with none gaining the upper hand. The same attitude governs his fundamental epistemological position about the nature of truth. Each competitor in the agon is expected to stake his or her claims on truth; Nietzsche advanced his own opinions with utmost vehemence. The ultimate truth is that no claim should achieve dominion over all others. As Richard Rorty maintained, Nietzsche can be understood as a particularly flamboyant kind of pragmatist. We don’t think of William James as a “dangerous mind,” and yet he, too, said, “Damn the Absolute!”

Whenever I feel bewildered by endless interpretive skirmishes over the philosophical Antichrist, I return to Alexander Nehamas’s “Nietzsche: Life as Literature,” which appeared in 1985 and retains a commanding place on the near-infinite Nietzsche bookshelf. Nehamas, a Greek-American thinker steeped in classical studies, essentially made a virtue of Bertrand Russell’s dismissal of Nietzsche. The contradictions in Nietzsche’s writings cohere, Nehamas writes, if we look at him as a literary figure who worked within a philosophical context, and who crafted a persona that functions as a literary character of novelistic complexity.

The disparity between the living Nietzsche and the written one was indeed drastic. He was a fragile, sensitive, gentle person with elegant manners, constantly striving to mask his inner turmoil and physical distress. He let his personal anguish be reflected in a universal predicament: how can we hold to our convictions in the face of chaos, conflict, decay, and death? The idea of the eternal return—the prospect of having to live one’s life over and over, every detail repeated, every pain alongside every joy—becomes all the more potent when one thinks about having to relive that life, to its terrible end.

Nietzsche remains a heroic figure in intellectual history because his lonely, desperate quest seems to join up with so many other expeditions of the mind and soul. Wherever you travel, in sunny climates or in the shadowlands, Nietzsche has gone before you. Such is the temper of what may be the most openhearted and unproblematic passage in all of his writings—the closing aphorism of “Dawn,” perhaps his most beautiful book:

                 All these bold birds who fly out into the wide, widest open—it is true! At some point they will not be able to fly any farther and will squat down on some pylon or sparse crag—and very grateful for this miserable accommodation to boot! But who would want to conclude from this that there was no longer a vast and prodigious trajectory ahead of them, that they had flown as far and wide as one could fly! All our great mentors and precursors have finally come to a stop, and it is hardly the noblest and most graceful of gestures with which fatigue comes to a stop: it will also happen to you and me! Of what concern, however, is that to you and me! Other birds will fly farther!

Nietzsche’s Eternal Return. By  Alex Ross. The New Yorker,  October 7, 2019.

Has ever the discrepancy between a man’s thought and person been greater than in Friedrich Nietzsche? The high-altitude prophet of the Übermensch, the walrus-mustachioed eulogist of God, the trumpeter of eternal return was, in person, kind, courteous, and impeccably well mannered. At a pension in Nice, he was affectionately known as the “dear, half-blind professor.” Julius Paneth, a Viennese zoologist, described him as “very simple and natural […] he bore no trace of pomposity or prophetic bearing.” When the feminist intellectual Lou Andreas-Salomé first met him, she found him entirely unremarkable: a man of medium height, simply but carefully clothed, with plain, brown hair and a large mustache. He spoke and even laughed softly, bending his shoulders slightly. Still, there was something about the man that set him apart. “One could only with difficulty imagine this figure within a crowd,” she wrote. “He gave the impression of standing aside, of standing alone.”

This was, as Stefan Zweig wrote, the tragedy of Nietzsche’s life: that it was a one-man show, a monodrama “wherein no other actor entered upon the stage.” The deeper and more demanding Nietzsche’s thinking became, the more his readership dwindled in size. The Birth of Tragedy (1872), his first book, sold 625 copies in six years; the three parts of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, published between 1883 and 1885, sold fewer than a hundred copies each. Not until it was too late did his works finally reach a few decisive ears, including Edvard Munch, August Strindberg, and the Danish-Jewish critic Georg Brandes, whose lectures at the University of Copenhagen first introduced Nietzsche’s philosophy to a wider audience. By then, Nietzsche’s descent into madness had already begun. In his final letter to Brandes, he signed himself: “The Crucified.”

As we learn from Sue Prideaux’s masterful new biography, I Am Dynamite!: A Life of Nietzsche, the German thinker’s solitude was partly forced on him by his debilitating health. Insomnia, jaundice, vomiting, hemorrhoids, blindness, crippling headaches, wrecked bowels, chronic exhaustion — I Am Dynamite! sometimes reads like a calamitous medical record. Yet in spite of his deteriorating health and accelerating insanity, Friedrich Nietzsche somehow managed to drag himself and his trunk of books over the mountains of Europe, writing in short bursts of intense self-discipline the philosophical texts for which he is now known. “He ranged like Promotheus over the high places,” Prideaux writes, “but his ascent always had to stop short of the greatest heights, where the bright light of the eternal snows pierced his eyes like bared swords, as he noted down his thoughts toward the next book.”

What sets Prideaux’s biography apart from previous accounts of Nietzsche’s life is its vibrant intimacy. Eschewing philosophical rigorousness for human proximity, Prideaux quite simply gets closer to Nietzsche than anyone before her. The Zarathustrian mask falls away and the vulnerable human is bared. We are permitted to see how his ideas, his style, grew from the feeble timber of his physical being. Nietzsche recognized this essential relationship, of course. In Beyond Good and Evil, he writes that philosophy is “a confession on the part of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir.” Nietzsche wanted his readers to know this also, to see through the prejudice of philosophers, his own included. “You had not yet sought yourselves: and you found me,” Zarathustra says to his disciples. “Now I bid you lose me and find yourselves.”

¤

Nietzsche was born in 1844 in Röcken, 15 miles south of Leipzig in the eastern German state of Saxony. His father, Karl Ludwig Nietzsche, a local pastor and former court tutor, was a meticulous man and gifted pianist admired for his Bach recitals. But he suffered from a mysterious nervous disorder that increasingly affected both his eyesight and his power of speech. He died in 1849, just 35 years old. In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche described him as “delicate, lovable and morbid, like a being destined to pay this world only a passing visit.” He noted, too, that the age of his father’s death was the same age at which he began to suffer himself. As Prideaux explains, interest in the cause of Karl Ludwig’s death has for this reason been considerable, though the exact nature of the degenerative brain disease he suffered from is not known.

Nietzsche was expected to follow in his father’s pastoral footsteps, and during his school years there was no reason to suggest he wouldn’t. He attended Schulpforta — “the foremost classical school in the German Bund” — and there distinguished himself as a student and musician, singing in the school choir and dazzling his peers with his improvisations on the piano. He excelled in Greek and Latin, and in his final year wrote a philological paper in Latin on the Greek poet Theognis of Megara that was considered exceptionally brilliant. When he graduated in 1864, he was said to have been “the most gifted pupil that Pforta has ever had.”

Nietzsche’s work ethic was impressive, given the growing catalog of physical afflictions he had to endure. On at least 20 occasions during his time at Pforta he was admitted to the sick ward where, Prideaux writes, his various headaches and stomach pains were treated with leeches “fastened to his earlobes to suck blood from his head.” He was put to bed in darkened rooms, wore smoked glasses to shield his eyes from the daylight, and was predicted by the school doctor to one day suffer total blindness. “At every age of my life,” Nietzsche later wrote, “suffering, monstrous suffering, was my lot.”

After Pforta there followed two semesters at the University of Bonn, where Nietzsche joined a student fraternity, Franconia, whose members were known to frequent the brothels of Cologne. It was during this time that, as legend stubbornly has it, Nietzsche contracted syphilis, the alleged cause of his mental breakdown. When he was first admitted to an asylum, in 1889, he told the doctors that he’d “infected himself twice,” though as Prideaux observes, he was probably referring to gonorrhea, not syphilis: “Had they looked at his medical records, they would have discovered that he had gonorrhea twice, a fact he admitted to doctors while still in his right mind.”

In 1865, Nietzsche left Bonn for Leipzig University, where he founded the Classical Society and began giving well-attended talks on philology, a dry subject he brought to zesty life. Four years later, the University of Basel in Switzerland offered him the post of Professor of Classical Philology, a remarkable achievement for a 24-year-old. But even as he accepted it, Nietzsche knew it was not a profession to which he was entirely suited. “I would like to be something more than a drillmaster for competent philologists,” he wrote to his friend Carl von Gersdorff. “To permeate my discipline with this new blood, to transmit to my listeners that Schopenhauerian seriousness which is stamped upon the brows of the sublime man, this is my wish, my daring hope.” To Erwin Rohde, a friend from his Leipzig days, he wrote: “I am gradually habituating myself to being a philosopher.”

The single most important event of Nietzsche’s tenure as a professor was his friendship with Richard Wagner, at the time Europe’s most celebrated composer. They had first met in November 1868 at the home of Wagner’s sister, where they had a long conversation about Schopenhauer, whom they both admired. Then in his mid-50s, the German composer was living in Tribschen with his second wife, Cosima, just 50 miles south of Basel. He invited the young philologist to come visit them. “During the course of the next three years,” Prideaux writes, “[Nietzsche] would visit Tribschen twenty-three times.” It was, he later admitted, the happiest time of his life.

But all the impassioned conversations and happy domesticity could not conceal the principal differences between them. Wagner was an antisemite, a Francophobe, and a German nationalist. “I am the most German person,” he wrote in his diary, “I am the German spirit.” Nietzsche, on the other hand, was “a bad German, but a good European,” as he himself put it. His experiences as a medical orderly during the Franco-Prussian War anaesthetized him to the supposed virtues of Prussian military might. Tending to the thousands of wounded scattered across the battlefields of Wörth, Hagenau, and Nancy, Nietzsche was repulsed by what he saw. He feared the bellicose nationalist mood would triumph over culture and intellect. “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles was, I fear, the end of German philosophy,” he wrote in The Twilight of Idols. Indeed, he gave up his Prussian citizenship in order to teach at Basel so he wouldn’t risk being called up for military service. For the rest of his life, he remained stateless.

A nascent trend in the Second German Reich that Nietzsche especially abhorred was antisemitism. It was an essential part of German nationalism in the 19th century and widely espoused by influential historians like Heinrich Treitschke and Friedrich Rühs. (Rühs once suggested that Jews ought to wear a yellow patch on their dress to better identify them.) Ever the individualist, Nietzsche recognized antisemitism as a trope of the herd animal, of the intellectually lazy German for whom he had so much contempt. “[It] would perhaps be a good idea,” he wrote in Beyond Good and Evil, “to eject the anti-Semitic ranters from the country.” In 1889, when he had already gone insane, he wrote to his friend Franz Overbeck: “I am just having all anti-Semites shot…”

The awful irony of Nietzsche’s anti-nationalism and good-Europeanism is that his sister, Elisabeth, ended up marrying Bernhard Förster, an antisemitic crackpot who in 1883 immigrated to Paraguay and founded Nueva Germania, a racially pure German colony. He was, Sue Prideaux writes, “a fanatical proselytizer for open-air hiking, vegetarianism, the health-giving properties of gymnastics, and the abolition of alcohol and vivisection.” (Why are fascists always teetotalers?) Nietzsche thought him monomaniacal and intellectually mediocre. How was he going to start a colony in the jungle if he didn’t eat meat? he teasingly asked his sister. When Elisabeth and Bernhard sent him money one year for Christmas, he cheerfully informed them he’d been so happy he immediately found a cafe and drank “three very large glasses of a sweet local wine and got a bitzeli drunk.” When he learned that Bernhard Förster’s nickname for Elisabeth was “Eli,” he sarcastically remarked to her that Eli means God in Hebrew.

Still, Nietzsche loved his sister dearly. He knew Elisabeth was “an intelligent female and he treated her as such.” When he was still a student, he had attempted to encourage her independence of thought. He showed her the process by which he himself had begun to question his faith. “If we had believed since youth that all salvation came not from Jesus but from another — say, from Mohammed — is it not certain that we would have enjoyed the same blessings?” he asked. He wanted to show her how believers deduce from their own inner experience the infallibility of their faith: “Every true faith is indeed infallible; it performs what the believing person hopes to find in it, but it does not offer the least support for the establishing of an objective truth.” Not that he sugarcoated the alternatives either. “If you want to achieve peace of mind and happiness, then have faith; if you want to be a disciple of truth, then search.”

He wasn’t kidding: Nietzsche’s own search for the truth never once gave him either happiness or peace of mind. During his time as a medical orderly, he had fallen dangerously ill and was diagnosed with both dysentery and diphtheria. “He was treated with silver nitrate, opium, and tannic acid enemas,” Prideaux writes, “the normal treatment of the time, the effect of which was to ruin the patient’s intestines for life.” In the years to come, his health only deteriorated further. He began to rely on friends to help him read, engaged Elisabeth to help keep house for him, and in 1876–’77 took a year’s leave of absence from the University of Basel. In 1879, he finally resigned. He sold his possessions, entrusted his financial affairs to his friend Franz Overbeck, and like Zarathustra himself “went into the mountains” to enjoy his spirit and solitude. “I live as if the centuries were nothing,” he wrote to a friend, “and I pursue my thoughts without thinking of the date and of the newspapers.”

For the 10 years of sane life he had left, the stateless Nietzsche was in a near-constant state of nomadic wandering. He had no luck in love, only very few friends, and virtually no readers. His headaches and vomiting sometimes kept him incapacitated for as many as 30 days straight. He couldn’t eat or sleep, and increasingly relied on powders of chloral hydrate to relieve his insomnia. But incorrect doses of this drug, Prideaux notes, produced “nausea, vomiting, hallucinations, confusion, convulsions, breathing and heart irregularities: all the symptoms, in fact, that Nietzsche was taking it to relieve.”

And yet he only seemed to become more prolific, more ambitious. He boldly took it upon himself to reevaluate all of Western philosophy, to think through the moral and religious prejudice that has kept us from seeking the truth — or, perhaps, kept the truth hidden from us. For Nietzsche believed that Western philosophy from the time of Socrates on had been an enormous misunderstanding, an epic blunder. Centuries of Christian morality had led to the current crisis of decadence and nihilism by teaching us to combat our instincts and exterminate our passions. Like Schopenhauer, Nietzsche believed life was dominated by irrational impulses and animal desires, by a blind, ceaseless will to live. But where Schopenhauer could see only meaninglessness and suffering, and thus resigned himself to pessimism, Nietzsche affirmed the will to live. “We others, we immoralists,” he wrote, “have on the contrary opened wide our hearts to every kind of understanding, comprehension, approval. We do not readily deny, we seek our honor in affirming.”

For Nietzsche, nihilism is not a belief in nothing, but a refusal to believe in what is. Christianity, by redirecting our gaze away from our animal existence toward some illusory divine harmony, was therefore nihilistic, hostile to life:

Christianity has taken the side of everything weak, base, ill-constituted, it has made an ideal out of opposition to the preservative instincts of strong life; it has depraved the reason even of the intellectually strongest natures by teaching men to feel the supreme values of intellectuality as sinful, as misleading, as temptations.

What is still thrilling about Nietzsche’s agon with God and Christianity is the fact that he was not a disinterested party. He knew that God’s death was not a deliverance into serene, rational light but a profoundly disruptive and disorienting experience that would make great demands of humanity. He valued strength, will, courage, and power because he knew the task that lay ahead was a serious one. “Christianity is a system,” he writes in Twilight of the Idols, “a consistently thought out and complete view of things. If one breaks out of it a fundamental idea, the belief in God, one thereby breaks the whole thing to pieces: one has nothing of any consequence left in one’s hands.” As a result of God’s death, all of morality will have to be dismantled, razed to the ground. Nothing less than a revaluation of all values is required.

This is where many of Nietzsche’s readers, I imagine, begin to fidget and shift a little in their seats, looking around for an excuse not to go on reading. For his attempts at filling the void left by God, his affirmation of life and the will to live, his theory of eternal recurrence and deification of the individual free spirit (the Übermensch), can often sound hyperbolic, self-aggrandizing, or simply insane. Nietzsche thought so himself. “He who knows how to breathe the air of my writings knows that it is an air of the heights, a robust air,” he writes in Ecce Homo. “One has to be made for it, otherwise there is no small danger one will catch cold.”

¤

In his engaging new memoir-essay, Hiking with Nietzsche: On Becoming Who You Are, the American philosopher John Kaag makes an impassioned effort to breathe that air, to scale those forbidding heights and peer into the post-Christian abyss. He takes seriously Nietzsche’s claim that in order understand him “one must be accustomed to living on mountains.”

Kaag’s book opens with an account of a journey he made as a 19-year-old philosophy student to Sils-Maria in Switzerland, where he spent several weeks hiking the same terrain Nietzsche knew so well: Splügen, Piz Corvatsch, Val Fex, the Julier Pass. Kaag stays overnight at the same boardinghouse where the German philosopher summered in the 1880s. He hikes for up to 15 hours a day, a copy of Nietzsche’s writings always at hand. On one occasion, he spends a cold night camping in the mountains, alone in the utter blackness. The temperature plunged so low frostbite left a permanent scar on his earlobe.

“Thirty-one days dilated, compressed, and slipped away,” Kaag recalls. “I stopped eating and sleeping. My hair grew shaggy and my pants loose.” His mother tells him he sounds “a little off” on the phone. Alone with Nietzsche’s writings, he comes close to suicide, lulled into a sense of vertigo by the peaks, gorges, and chasms all around him. He recalls Nietzsche’s words from Beyond Good and Evil: “And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you.” In the end, fortunately, he chickens out, as he puts it. On his last evening in Sils-Maria he breaks down, goes to a grand old hotel nearby, and splurges on a sumptuous six-course dinner.

Almost two decades later, Kaag returns to Sils-Maria with his wife, the Kantian philosopher Carol Hay, and their three-year-old daughter. In the intervening years, Kaag has become a professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, written a highly regarded book on American transcendental philosophy, and largely left his youthful Zarathustrian mania behind. But when he starts teaching a seminar on Nietzsche, the old demons begin to stir: “[O]n quiet nights, after a day of teaching Nietzsche, the high peaks once again began to beckon.” At his wife’s suggestion, the little family makes the trip to Switzerland together.

Kaag’s account of his return to Sils-Maria and of his reunion with the philosophical idol of his youth is an engrossing one. Now closer to middle age than his teenage years, he realizes that Nietzsche’s writings are actually “uniquely fitted” for adulthood. “Nietzsche’s philosophy is sometimes pooh-poohed as juvenile — the product of a megalomaniac that is perhaps well suited to the self-absorption and naïveté of the teenage years,” he writes. But Nietzsche’s task was “wakefulness itself,” as he put it, and when do we need that most urgently if not when we have begun to settle down? “At nineteen, on the summit of Corvatsch, I had no idea how dull the world could sometimes be,” Kaag writes. “How easy it would be to remain in the valleys, to be satisfied with mediocrity. Or how difficult it would be to stay alert to life. At thirty-six, I am just now beginning to understand.”

Hiking with Nietzsche serves as a straightforward and even practical introduction to the German philosopher’s writings, and makes a convincing case for why they continue to matter. Even readers not necessarily tempted to descend into the Nietzschean abyss will surely find Kaag’s exploration of selfhood, decadence, companionship, and physical duress both invigorating and thought-provoking. Contrary to the how-to-live-your-life genre, and in keeping with Nietzsche’s explosive and discomforting ideas, Kaag manages to ask all the right questions without irritably reaching for any palliative answers or solutions. Reflecting on Nietzsche’s beloved aphorism, become what you are, Kaag remarks:

The enduring nature of being human is to turn into something else, which should not be confused with going somewhere else. This may come as a great disappointment to one who goes in search of the self. What one is, essentially, is this active transformation, nothing more, nothing less. This is not a grand wisdom quest or hero’s journey, and it doesn’t require one to escape to the mountains.

Above all, Kaag’s portrait of Nietzsche, like Sue Prideaux’s, is a deeply moving one. Walking in his footsteps, he shows us the heights to which Nietzsche rose and the depths to which he sank, the sacrifices he made and the suffering he endured. “He continued to want, and now imagine, more than he could ever have,” Kaag writes in what is perhaps the most insightful and devastating observation in this elegant, incisive book.

The importance of these intimate, deeply human portraits of Nietzsche cannot be overstated. The identification of his thought with fascism and Nazism endures. After his storied breakdown in Turin in 1889, Nietzsche remained a mental invalid until his death in 1900. For most of those years, he was left in the care of his sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, fresh from her Aryan debacle in Paraguay where, after their colony had predictably been splintered by disagreements and fraud, her husband had taken his life. For the next four decades, Elisabeth tried to shape and control her brother’s posthumous legacy in a way that suited her racist and nationalist sympathies. In her own writings during World War I, she encouraged the cruelest misinterpretations of Nietzsche’s thought, portraying him as a conservative, militant patriot. Later still, Elisabeth happily allowed National Socialists to join her in the Nietzsche archive and aid in preparing his texts for new editions. Among them was the philosopher Alfred Bäumler, who helped orchestrate the book burnings in Berlin’s Opera Square in May 1933. Adolf Hitler, too, was a guest of the Nietzsche archive. In 1933, incredibly, Elisabeth presented him with Nietzsche’s walking stick.

The philosophical sanitation of Nietzsche’s ideas undertaken by Walter Kaufmann from the 1950s on is not yet complete. Deliberate misinterpretations are still with us. We need only look to the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, in whose recent book Enlightenment Now Nietzsche is portrayed as a philosophical monster. “Nietzsche argued that it’s good to be a callous, egoistic, megalomaniacal sociopath,” Pinker writes. Cherry-picking quotes from prejudicially scanned writings, he attempts to show that Nietzsche was a proto-Nazi: “The connections between Nietzsche’s ideas and the megadeath movements of the 20th century are obvious enough: a glorification of violence and power, an eagerness to raze the institutions of liberal democracy, a contempt for most of humanity, and a stone-hearted indifference to human life.”

Ironically, like the Nazis before him, Pinker ascribes beliefs to Nietzsche that would have horrified the philosopher. But just as Nietzsche has already debunked the positivistic liberalism still espoused by Pinker, so he knew that people would abuse and misrepresent his ideas. “I am frightened by the thought of what unqualified and unsuitable people may invoke my authority one day,” he wrote. “Yet that is the torment of every great teacher of mankind: he knows that, given the circumstances and the accidents, he can become a disaster as well as a blessing to mankind.” Nietzsche seems always to have had the last word. In that sense, too, he was a truly posthumous man.

The Sufferings of Nietzsche. By Morten Høi Jensen. Los Angeles Review of Books, December 5, 2018. 

Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx and Charles Darwin are the great triumvirate of 19th-century thinkers whose ideas still have huge impact today. Nietzsche was philosophy’s supreme iconoclast; his sayings include “God is dead” and “There are no facts, only interpretations”. Highly relevant, yet his association with concepts such as the Übermensch, master morality, slave morality and, possibly most dangerous, the will to power, have also contributed to him being widely misinterpreted. There are three myths in particular that need dynamiting: that his politics were on the far right, he was a misogynist and he lacked a sense of humour.

Misappropriation has been rife. Richard Spencer, a leader of America’s “alt-right”, claims to have been “red-pilled by Nietzsche”, while Jordan Peterson quotes extensively from him. But let’s start with the Nazis. Growing up in Bismarck’s reich, there were three things Nietzsche hated: the big state, nationalism and antisemitism. “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles, that is the end of German philosophy,” he wrote, and “I will have all antisemites shot.”

His sister Elisabeth held contrasting views. She married a notorious antisemite agitator (Nietzsche refused to go to the wedding), and the couple went off to Paraguay to found a New Germany of “pure-blooded” Aryan colonists. By the time the colony failed in 1889, Nietzsche had lost his reason. Elisabeth returned to Germany, where she took charge of her brother, gathered up all his papers and founded the Nietzsche Archive.

When it came to faking news, Elisabeth was a pioneer. On her brother’s death in 1900, Elisabeth didn’t think his death mask was sufficiently impressive, so she faked a second one. She did the same to his writing, rummaging about in his literary estate, cutting and pasting at will. She published an unreliable biography of him and delayed publication of his autobiography, Ecce Homo, until she had deleted uncomplimentary references to herself.

Nietzsche was always very sparing in what he published, but he loved playing around with book titles. He wrote many more titles than books. One he scrapped was The Will to Power. He scrawled a shopping list on the abandoned title page. But Elisabeth took fragments from here and there, concocted a book called The Will to Power and published it under her brother’s name. It was such a success that a few years later she published a greatly expanded edition.

Elisabeth lived until 1935. This gave her almost 40 years to doctor texts and letters and manipulate the literary estate. The Nietzsche Archive became an institution filled with extreme rightwingers, whose aggressive nationalism chimed with her own.Among them were Oswald Spengler, and Alfred Bäumler, who oversaw book burning in Berlin and prepared Nietzsche’s texts for new editions, including another The Will to Power that again gave the impression the text had been authored by Nietzsche himself. Bäumler was joined as editor in the Nietzsche Archive by Martin Heidegger. The two of them took the extraordinary view that Nietzsche’s published works hardly counted because the real philosophy resided in the Nachlass, the unpublished literary estate that Elisabeth had already manipulated to her own ends. This allowed them to continue jigsawing dislocated fragments to put their own ideas into Nietzsche’s mouth.

Elisabeth greatly admired Mussolini. In 1932 she persuaded the Weimar National theatre to put on a play written by him. Hitler showed up during the performance and presented her with a huge bouquet of flowers. A year later, now chancellor of Germany, he visited the Nietzsche Archive, carrying his customary whip. He remained for an hour and a half. When he emerged the whip had gone. In its place he grasped Nietzsche’s walking stick, presented to him by Elisabeth.

Hitler was infatuated with the idea of himself as the philosopher leader. It is impossible to prove whether he studied Nietzsche; it is widely believed he did not. The surviving books from his library during his time in prison in 1924, when he wrote Mein Kampf, do not include any works by Nietzsche. It must be possible they were part of his book collection at the time and have since been lost but his later library preserves no well-thumbed copies. The notorious film of the 1934 Nuremberg rally was given the deliberately Nietzschean title Triumph of the Will, but when the director, Leni Riefenstahl, asked Hitler whether he liked to read Nietzsche, he answered: “No, I can’t really do much with Nietzsche … he is not my guide.”

The complicated ideas contained in the books were of no use to him, but catch phrases such as “the blond beast”, the Übermensch (neither of which is a racial concept) and “beyond good and evil” could be put to infinite misuse. Yet even as Nazi propagandists and phrasemongers usurped Nietzsche’s words and meaning, some among them realised the absurdity. Ernst Krieck, a prominent Nazi ideologue, sarcastically remarked that apart from the fact that Nietzsche was not a socialist, not a nationalist and opposed to racial thinking, he might have been a leading National Socialist thinker.

Nietzsche also has an undeserved reputation as a misogynist. Born in 1844, he attended one of the best schools in Europe while Elisabeth was sent to Fräulein Paraski’s institution to be taught how to capture a husband, run a household and speak just sufficient French to be considered elegant but not (God forbid) learned. Yet Nietzsche treated Elisabeth as an equal. He gave her reading lists, urged her to think for herself and widen her knowledge by attending public lectures.

In 1874, when he was professor of philology at Basel University, a vote was taken on the admission of women to the university. Nietzsche was one of only four who voted in favour, and the motion was lost.

In 1876, he travelled to Italy to join Malwida von Meysenbug, a feminist who campaigned vigorously for the emancipation of women. Meysenbug had been exiled from Germany for smuggling letters during the revolution of 1848, after which she settled among the political exiles in north London, working as a tutor. Malwida’s reputation was such that when Garibaldi sailed up the Thames in 1864, he summoned her to talk politics over breakfast on his yacht. Malwida was starstruck by Garibaldi’s Pirates of the Caribbean glamour as he lowered an upholstered armchair to winch her comfortably up onto the deck for their breakfast meeting.

Nietzsche and Meysenbug intended to found a school for free spirits in the caves beneath Sorrento.The free spirits were to include women and nothing would be off limits in their study of culture, philosophy, aesthetics, religious scepticism and sexual freedom. The school never materialised but his friendship with Meysenbug widened Nietzsche’s feminist circle to include Meta von Salis-Marschlins, an activist for women’s suffrage, and Resa von Schirnhofer.

By the 1880s, women were allowed into the university lecture theatre as Hörerin, “listeners”. Nietzsche encouraged his sister, Salis-Marschlins and Schirnhofer to apply. In 1887, Salis-Marschlins became the first woman to gain a PhD from a Swiss university. Schirnhofer followed suit. Both gained their doctorates in philosophy.

In 1882, Nietzsche fell completely and drastically in love with Lou Salomé, who would later enchant both Rilke and Freud. During this period, he wrote about the psychological dilemma of women. In The Gay Science, he notes how monstrous it is that young women are told that sex is shameful and sinful, only to be hurled into marriage and propelled by the man they are taught to worship as a god into the terror and duty of sex. How are they expected to cope? “There,” he observes, “one has tied a psychic knot that has no equal.”

I had no idea Nietzsche could be funny until I read his letters. “The gentlest, most reasonable man may, if he wears a large moustache, sit as it were in its shade and feel safe,” he wrote, self-mockingly. “As the accessory of a large moustache he will give the impression of being military, irascible and sometimes violent – and will be treated accordingly.”

Condemned by ill health and abysmal eyesight to convey his philosophy in short, aphoristic bursts, Nietzsche knew the power of raising a bubble of laughter, only to puncture it as you ponder the further meaning: “Is man God’s mistake, or is God man’s mistake?” “Man does not strive for happiness; only the Englishman does that” – a dig at Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. “Possession usually diminishes the possession.” “Never trust a thought that occurs to you indoors.” He even makes fun of his readers: “The worst readers are those who behave like plundering troops: they take away a few things they can use, dirty and confound the remainder, and revile the whole.”

Nietzsche is an unusual philosopher because he doesn’t tell us what to think. There’s no such thing as Nietzsche-ism. He sums it up in one of his aphorisms: “You repay a teacher badly by becoming merely a pupil.” In other words, read me but think further.

As for the myths that have grown up around him, the last word surely should belong to the man himself. “I am frightened,” he wrote, “by the thought of what unqualified and unsuitable people may invoke my authority one day. Yet that is the torment of every teacher … he knows that, given the circumstances and accidents, he can become a disaster as well as a blessing to mankind.”

Far right, misogynist, humourless? Why Nietzsche is misunderstood. By Sue Prideaux.The Guardian , October 6, 2018.

Also of interest : 

Friedrich Nietzsche knew his controversial philosophy was “dynamite,” but his work wasn’t appreciated until after he descended into madness. His megalomaniac sister Elisabeth, who had a penchant for National Socialism and deceitfulness, took control of his work, exploiting and manipulating it. Antisemite ideology disgusted Nietzsche, yet ironically Elisabeth left him with a false antisemitic reputation that still lingers.

It’s a tragic story, but now that Elisabeth’s interference has been untangled, Nietzsche’s work seems to be more popular than ever, if new books such as Hiking with Nietzsche by John Kaag and the seven-way bidding war for the manuscript of Sue Prideaux’s biography titled I Am Dynamite! are any indication. Prideaux’s investigation illuminates Nietzsche as a brilliant man of polar extremes with a sense of humor and despair, an ability not to take himself too seriously, a love of both Apollonian and Dionysian aspects of life, and many love-hate relationships — with his sister, mother, Richard Wagner, Lou Salomé, and others.

“The Weightiest Questions in the Smallest Number of Words”: Retelling the Nietzsche Story

Skye C. Cleary interviews Sue Prideaux. Los Angeles Review of Books,  October 24, 2018.