Individuality and Beyond: Nietzsche Reads Emerson

Abstract

Three decades have elapsed since Stanley Cavell, regarding Nietzsche’s debt to Emerson, remarked, “no matter how obvious to anyone who cares to verify it, it stays incredible” (Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990], 40). With this book, Benedetta Zavatta has dispelled completely and forever that aura of the incredible. The book is a great advance on the two previous monographs dedicated to the Emerson–Nietzsche connection (George Stack, Nietzsche and Emerson: An Elective Affinity [Athens: Ohio University Press, 1992], and David Mikics, The Romance of Individualism in Emerson and Nietzsche [Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003]) for the philological basis of her interpretations.Zavatta’s readings of Nietzsche are supported by his substantial Emerson marginalia and the passages of Emerson’s that he copied, with variations, in a separate notebook (collected in the Nachlass as “Emerson Exemplar” and “Exzerpte aus Emersons ‘Essays’” (KSA 9:13[1–22] and KSA 9:17[1–39], respectively). She establishes Nietzsche’s consistent engagement with Emerson, from his school days and for the duration of his writing life, in particular by recognizing the centrality of self-cultivation in each thinker’s writing, and demonstrates the considerable extent to which Nietzsche developed in conversation with Emerson, even while he diverged from the American. As protean as both writers are—and as antithetical to systematic philosophy—any scholar risks reductionism in attempting to pin down strict correspondences between them. Fortunately, this is not the author’s aim. Zavatta does not give us an Emersonian Nietzsche or a Nietzschean Emerson. She is particularly instructive in bringing the American thinker into the largely German philosophical context in which Nietzsche encountered him. More importantly, in keeping with her philological approach, Zavatta restricts herself to the Emerson that Nietzsche read—and reread.Unlike Stack, she ventures no interpretations based on Emerson’s Nature, for example, as there is no evidence of Nietzsche’s having read it. The Emerson volumes that Nietzsche owned and read in German translation include Essays: First and Second Series, Conduct of Life, Letters and Social Aims, and On Goethe and Shakespeare (two essays excerpted from Emerson’s Representative Men for a German edition). Nietzsche’s copies—he had two—of Conduct of Life, as well as On Goethe and Shakespeare, went missing at some point during the Second World War. It is worth noting, however, that Nietzsche’s copy of Essays: First and Second Series (translated by G. Fabricius) is the most heavily annotated and underlined book in the Nietzsche archive in Weimar. This is all the more remarkable as it is his second copy. (His first was lost when his travel bag was stolen in 1874 while he was working on the third of his Untimely Meditations, “Schopenhauer as Educator.”) As Zavatta notes, when Mazzino Montinari, preparing the Critical Edition in 1964 in Weimar, examined the extant copy, he wrote to Giorgio Colli, “Emerson is a goldmine for all our volumes!” (204). Her study proves his enthusiasm was warranted. Zavatta’s meticulous research provides as detailed an account of Nietzsche’s relationship to Emerson as we are likely to see.In the first of five chapters Zavatta addresses the reception of the Emerson–Nietzsche connection, providing a detailed account of how and why the relation had been downplayed, when not outright denied, by various commentators, both American and European, for the better part of a century. The often intersecting discussions in the chapters that follow—“The Struggle Against Fate,” “Self-Reliance as Moral Autonomy and as Original Self-Expression,” “Society or Solitude?,” and “Making and Writing History”—revisit disputed topics in Nietzsche’s critical corpus.In chapter 2, Zavatta ascribes a compatibilist account of freedom to Nietzsche, one in which “freedom” proceeds from true volition and deliberate choices. That is, Nietzsche grasps freedom from a psychological point of view while he denies the existence of free will as a causa sui. That Nietzsche would take a viewpoint grounded in psychology is not surprising. What surprises is Zavatta’s tracing the stance to Nietzsche’s first encounter with Emerson in 1862, when, at age seventeen, he first read the essay “Fate” in The Conduct of Life, recently published in a German a translation. She draws on Nietzsche’s two extracurricular efforts from that year, “Freedom and History” and “Freedom of Will and Fate,” as well as “On Moods” (written in 1864 after Nietzsche’s acquisition of Essays), to show that through Emerson’s conception of “fate” as an internal necessity, also called “temperament,” Nietzsche arrives at a view of “the will” and “fate” akin to a “civil war” between one’s “mental dispositions” (29). This has consequences for the question of whether or not character is immutable. In this context, Zavatta quotes a line from Emerson’s “Spiritual Laws”: “A man is a method, a progressive arrangement; a selecting principle.” As an aside, and this would seem to support Zavatta’s claims, not only does Nietzsche underline “selecting principle” (auswählendes Princip) in his copy of Emerson’s Essays, he later employs the phrase in EH “Clever” 1, in a passage which reads like a rephrasing of Emerson and Emersonian self-trust. Importantly, in this chapter and elsewhere, Zavatta is careful to point out where Nietzsche, in assimilating Emerson, did so without taking on, indeed in opposition to, Emerson’s metaphysical views. And yet there are inconsistencies in Nietzsche, if not Zavatta. Given Zavatta’s consistent attention to Nietzsche’s middle period, she misses an opportunity to engage Nietzsche’s assertion in WS that “Socrates’ most personal characteristic was a participation in every temperament” and that he possessed a “wisdom full of roguishness” constituting “the finest state of the human soul” (WS 86).Chapter 3 examines what Nietzsche’s reading of Emerson contributed to his views regarding how one develops his or her capacities toward a transvaluation of inherited values and, ultimately, genuine originality. Zavatta convincingly argues that in Emerson’s Essays and in “Self-Reliance” in particular, Nietzsche found a criterion by which to carry out a transvaluation and treat with “divine indifference” (Emerson’s phrase) the ideals and morality of one’s contemporaries. This was not merely a theoretical concern for Nietzsche. In the face of his own untimeliness it was a pressing personal need. Paraphrasing George Kateb (Emerson and Self-Reliance [Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002]), Zavatta points out that the self-reliant individual must remain continually receptive and recognize the contingency of his or her own individuality. Here her discussion of Emerson’s “intellectual nomadism” intersects with her discussion of the selecting principle and temperament in the previous chapter, and it is crucial to an understanding of Nietzsche’s notion of objectivity. Zavatta quotes from Nietzsche’s routinely debated statement on objectivity in GM (III:12) and argues for an Emerson-informed reading. She specifically takes issue with the interpretation offered by Anthony K. Jensen in Nietzsche’s Philosophy of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013) that objectivity, in Nietzsche’s view, is arrived at though the intersubjective agreement about judgments from among those of a specific psychological type. Zavatta concludes that this agreement, such as it is, is internal to an individual “after having considered this thing from a whole range of different points of view” (95). Unknown to Zavatta, I stated a similar case for a multiplicity of internal perspectives reading of GM III:12 in my own review of Jensen’s book (British Journal for the History of Philosophy 23.5 [2015]: 1015). Her analysis of objectivity prepares readers for her discussion of power and assimilation.Zavatta articulates what Nietzsche’s critique of compassion owes to Emerson in chapter 4. Emerson’s lack of faith in collectives and the very idea of community, a reaction to the utopian aspirations of various groups and movements in the New England of his day, is counterbalanced by an ethics of friendship in which what is most prized is the distinctive individuality of another person. On the author’s account, what Nietzsche derives from Emerson, together with an ardent self-sufficiency and love of privacy, is a reverence for the “other.”In chapter 5 Nietzsche’s skepticism regarding an idealized or suprapersonal conception of objectivity is shown to have consequences for his uses of history and historiography. Zavatta argues that through his encounters with Emerson, Nietzsche moves from the “active forgetting” position toward history espoused in the second UM to conceiving a more personal, fruitful, and virtuous, relationship to the past. Emerson’s essay on Goethe from Representative Men provides a model. Zavatta points out the similarities between Nietzsche’s image of Goethe in TI (“Skirmishes” 49) and Emerson’s portrait. In strong contrast with Thomas Carlyle, Emerson, and Nietzsche after him, was concerned not with the great men of history in themselves but with the uses to which they might be put for individual self-cultivation and the invigorating of culture more broadly. It is worth noting that although Emerson’s introductory essay to Representative Men, “The Uses of Great Men,” was as yet unpublished in German translation, in the autumn of 1883, Nietzsche cajoled Ida Overbeck (wife of Franz) into translating it for him. Discussing how, in Emerson’s view, great deeds might be cognitively assimilated—namely, through an original action of one’s own—Zavatta shows how Nietzsche himself assimilates both the style and the philosophical import of a passage from Emerson’s “Spiritual Laws” (GS 337) and, in the process, arrives at something new, posing a question not asked by Emerson. This passage is one of the book’s many rewards, but it also draws the reader’s attention to a peculiar lack.Zavatta points out in her introduction Nietzsche’s honoring Emerson as a “master of prose” (xiii). With greater success than Nietzsche himself, he was also a poet. She also dedicates a couple of pages to “The Conflict between the Free Thinker and the Institutions” in chapter 3 (85–88). And yet, in her readings of the two thinkers, scant attention is paid to the paramount importance of writing itself, and to what such an emphasis on style—in Nietzsche’s case, a great variety of styles—contributes to their thought. Zavatta dismisses the view put forward by Paul Grimstad (Experience and Experimental Writing [New York: Oxford University Press, 2013], 32–33) and noted in my introduction to Nietzsche’s Emerson marginalia (Journal of Nietzsche Studies 44.3 [2013]: 398–408, 407) that the “gay science” (for Emerson and Nietzsche alike) relates to composition, even though it seems compatible with her assertion that “the trait and test of the poet is that he builds, adds, affirms” (59). This is puzzling. For however we suppose one “builds, adds, affirms,” poets, whatever else they do, write. A notable exception to Zavatta’s eschewal of style is her discussion of “Schopenhauer as Educator” (84), in which she highlights Nietzsche’s appreciation of Schopenhauer’s writing as “conceptual poetry” (Begriffsdichtung) through which the older philosopher attained self-expression and original thought (Emerson’s enthusiasm even for Goethe’s commas and dashes comes to mind). The reader is tantalized at this point in the study at the prospect of a discussion of the role of style in value creation. We are brought to the cusp of such a discussion in her analysis of Emerson and Nietzsche’s conception of the “gay science.” But Zavatta treats the creation of “new values and styles of life” (62) exclusive of artistic creation—or, in this case, to use Nietzsche’s term, Begriffsdichtung. As a result, she comes very near to treating both thinkers as philosophers of a university variety.