American Exceptionalism
Nietzsche once wrote that there was only ever one true Christian, and that he died on the cross. In the same vein, one can say that there was only ever one true Nietzschean, and by the time his monographs landed in American bookstores in the 1890s, he was already confined to his sister’s attic, his mind in the throes of madness after decades of battling intractable migraines. If Nietzsche had stayed sane enough to know of his burgeoning fan base across the pond, he may have delighted in this cultural exchange. After all, before Nietzsche’s work came to America, America came to him, in the form of the Transcendentalist philosophy of Ralph Waldo Emerson.
As a teen, Nietzsche had discovered Emerson’s works and read them as thoroughly as Ahmari read Nietzsche. Nietzsche and Emerson had similar life trajectories: they were both Pfarrerskinder (preacher’s children) who later abandoned their ministerial upbringings to launch philosophies of radical individualism. Nietzsche’s Emerson volumes were the most heavily annotated books in his personal library, with the marginalia full of praise for Emerson’s reflections on the nature of the free-spirited individual, outside tradition and convention. Nietzsche apparently saw Emerson as his “twin soul.”
America has long served as a place where people go to break free from tradition and convention, beginning with Puritans and Quakers fleeing religious persecution down to present-day celebrations of America as a “nation of immigrants” and “land of opportunity.” So it is perhaps no surprise that an Emerson-inspired champion of free spirits would find an audience here.
Conversely, some American interpreters specifically embraced Nietzsche as a critic of American philistinism; they found in Nietzsche’s Teutonic profundity an escape from an America they saw as too capitalistic, democratic, Christian, and/or anti-intellectual to ever produce worthwhile philosophy. Thus, Nietzsche has always had a Janus-faced appeal on this side of the Atlantic: he was, on the one hand, a seemingly Americanized philosopher whose work resonated with American ideals but, on the other, a German philosopher whose superior European intellect revealed the shallowness of American culture.
The very fact that Nietzsche’s philosophy was able to inspire such contradictory interpretations points toward another aspect of American exceptionalism. The theologian Tara Isabella Burton describes how the Enlightenment reshaped Western metaphysics away from imagining humans as actors in a God-created world and toward the invention of the autonomous individual able to create one’s own destiny, thus allowing humans to “become gods.” This led to the notion of “aristocratic individualism” in western Europe, the belief that a select few “natural aristocrats” could make themselves into godlike beings. By contrast, the American ethos was shaped by democratic individualism and free market capitalism; anyone, at least in theory, could become a “self-made man” as long as he had enough entrepreneurial flair and the (Protestant) work ethic to make things happen. Thus, while European interpretations of Nietzsche often involved narratives in which an Übermensch claimed his “deserved” place in the social hierarchy, American interpretations emphasized unshackling oneself from societal constraints (such as Christian morality) and (re)creating one’s own “truth” and values in a journey of self-actualization.