Individuality and Beyond: Nietzsche Reads Emerson by Benedetta Zavatta

Abstract

Reviewed by: Individuality and Beyond: Nietzsche Reads Emerson by Benedetta Zavatta Marta Faustino ZAVATTA, Benedetta. Individuality and Beyond: Nietzsche Reads Emerson. Translated by Alexander Reynolds. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. xxv + 265 pp. Cloth, $90.00 Even though Emerson’s influence on Nietzsche’s work has long been acknowledged within Nietzsche scholarship, Zavatta’s book is the first thorough and finely detailed examination of Nietzsche’s fruitful and enthusiastic reading of Emerson throughout the various stages of his life. Its solid and, up to now, neglected philological basis is the book’s greatest strength. Zavatta carefully goes through Nietzsche’s notebooks, letters, and personal library, perspicuously tracing the underlinings, comments, and annotations in his copies of Emerson’s works. Since Emerson appears only three times in Nietzsche’s published writings, this is an important and much needed work, which Zavatta carries off with exemplary care and mastery of the sources. The book is divided into five main chapters that reveal the affinity of Emerson and Nietzsche by tracing two of their fundamental philosophical [End Page 422] concerns: the development of individuality, on the one hand, and the overcoming of this individuality once it has been achieved, on the other. After surveying the development of scholarly work about Emerson’s influence on Nietzsche and exploring why the study on the Emerson–Nietzsche relation could emerge only almost a century after Nietzsche’s death, in chapter 1 (“The Reception of the Emerson-Nietzsche Relation”) Zavatta insightfully discusses four major themes in Nietzsche’s writings where this affinity, and more specifically Emerson’s influence, can most evidently be ascertained. Chapter 2, “The Struggle against Fate,” deals with the problem of fate, determinism, and free will in Nietzsche’s philosophy. Zavatta ascribes a compatibilist account of freedom to Nietzsche and shows that fundamental insights in his construction of freedom as agency were influenced by Emerson. Despite important differences between the two authors on this topic, Emerson played a decisive role in shaping Nietzsche’s combination of determinism with the sense of being free as an agent of one’s own actions. The problem of freedom interested both authors, Zavatta argues, more from a psychological point of view than from a theoretical one, converging on the idea that “the feeling of freedom coincides with a feeling of personal attainment and achievement.” In chapter 3, entitled “Self-Reliance as Moral Autonomy and Original Self-Expression,” Zavatta focuses on Nietzsche’s criticism of Christian morality and the interrelated transvaluation of values, highlighting Emerson’s contribution to his alternative model of morality. Describing both authors’ models as forms of pluralistic “virtue ethics,” Zavatta uses Emerson’s notion of “self-reliance” to clarify Nietzsche’s ideas of individuality and respective “journey of individualization,” chronologically personified in the figures of “Schopenhauer as educator,” the free spirit, and Zarathustra, all of which Emerson helped to shape. For both authors, becoming an individual equates to conquering moral autonomy, even if they disagree on how precisely true individuality is attained and moral autonomy achieved. Chapter 4, “Society or Solitude?”, discusses Nietzsche’s critique of compassion and what Zavatta calls the “transvaluation of egoism.” Zavatta shows that Emerson decisively influenced Nietzsche’s positive appraisal of egoism as “individualism,” which also involves a higher and healthier form of concern for and commitment to the well-being of the collectivity. Special attention is given to the topic of friendship, which Zavatta defines as a form of “love for the distinctive individuality of the other person.” According to the author, Emerson led Nietzsche to extend his “ethics of friendship” to society as a whole, whereby the latter “becomes the model for all social relations.” In the fifth and final chapter, entitled “Making History and Writing History,” Zavatta addresses Nietzsche’s views on history and historiography throughout the various stages of his work, highlighting the influence Emerson exerted on the evolution of Nietzsche’s position from the second Untimely Meditation to the works of the middle and late [End Page 423] periods. Zavatta argues that Nietzsche’s reading of Emerson was crucial to the former’s abandonment of the virtue of “active forgetting” from Human, All Too Human onward and the discovery of a healthy and virtuous...