American Nietzsche

by Ratner-rosenhagen, Jennifer

• ISBN13: 9780226705811
• ISBN10: 0226705811
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-11-30
• Publisher: Univ of Chicago Pr

Summary

If you were looking for a philosopher likely to appeal to Americans, Friedrich Nietzsche would be far from your first choice. After all, in his blazing career, Nietzsche took aim at nearly all the foundations of modern American life: Christian morality, the Enlightenment faith in reason, and the idea of human equality. Despite that, for more than a century Nietzsche has been a hugely popular-and surprisingly influential-figure in American high and popular culture alike. In American Nietzsche, Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen delves deeply into Nietzsche's thought, and America's reception of it, to tell the story of his curious appeal. Beginning her account as far back as Emerson, whom the seventeen-year-old Nietzsche read obsessively, she shows how Nietzsche's ideas first burst on American shores at the turn of the twentieth century, and how they continued to alternately invigorate and shock Americans for the century to come. She also traces out the broader intellectual and cultural contexts in which a wide array of commentators-academic and armchair philosophers, theologians and atheists, romantic poets and hard-nosed empiricists, and political ideologues and apostates from the Left and the Right-drew insight and inspiration from Nietzsche's claims for the death of God, his challenge to universal truth, and his insistence on the interpretive nature of all human thought and beliefs. At the same time, she explores how his image as an iconoclastic immoralist was put to work in American popular culture, making Nietzsche an unlikely posthumous celebrity capable of inspiring teenagers and scholars alike. A heady examination of a powerful, but little-explored undercurrent of twentieth-century American culture, American Nietzschedramatically recasts our understanding of American intellectual life-and puts Nietzsche squarely at its heart.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	p. ix
Prologue: Transatlantic Crossings: The Aboriginal Intellect Abroad	p. 1
Introduction	p. 21
The Making of the American Nietzsche	p. 29
Nietzsche and the European Axis of American Cosmopolitanism	p. 35
The Nietzsche Vogue	p. 45
The Persona of Nietzsche	p. 51
Launching "Nietzschean" and "Nietzscheism" into American English	p. 67
The Soul of Man under Modernity	p. 69
Nietzsche and the Problems of Modern Thought	p. 75
Unapologetic Catholic Apologetics	p. 80
The Social Gospel and the Practicability of Christianity	p. 87
Nietzsche's Service to Christianity	p. 94
Jesus of Nazareth, Nietzsche of Naumburg	p. 99
The American Naturalization of the Übermensch	p. 109
The Übermensch in the Popular Imagination	p. 112
Self-Overcoming and Social Uplift	p. 116
Modern Whirl and Romantic Self-Abandonment	p. 126
The Übermensch and the German National Mind	p. 132
The Übermensch at War and the "Made in Germany" Generation	p. 136
To Each His Own Übermensch	p. 144
Nietzsche as Educator	p. 149
Experiencing Intellect; or, World-Making Words	p. 154
Imitatio Nietzsche	p. 167
The "Gay Science" of Cultural Criticism	p. 176
The Modern Intellect and Prophetic Longing	p. 190
INTERLUDE: Devotions: The Letters	p. 193
Nietzsche Possession, Possessing Nietzsche	p. 199
Nietzschean Self-Fashioning	p. 203
Nietzsche Pilgrimage	p. 209
Pathos of Distance from Democratic Culture	p. 210
Dionysian Enlightenment	p. 219
Walter Kaufmann, German Émigrés, and Nietzsche as Hider's Exile	p. 224
Nietzsche as Problem Thinker	p. 233
Nietzsche and the Nazis	p. 239
Nietzschean Experimentalism and Jamesian Pragmatism	p. 244
Counter-Dionysian Enlightenments	p. 250
Kaufmann's Nietzsche for All and None	p. 260
Antifoundationalism on Native Grounds	p. 263
Harold Bloom: The Quest for Emersonian Priority	p. 274
Richard Rorty: Fusing the Horizons between Nietzsche and the Pragmatists	p. 285
Stanley Cavell: Nietzsche, Emerson, and American Philosophy Finding Its Way Home	p. 295
Thinking about American Thinking	p. 304
Epilogue: Nietzsche Is Us	p. 307
Acknowledgments	p. 313
Notes	p. 321
Bibliography	p. 387
Index	p. 443
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