Conventional Iconoclasm: The Cultural Work of the Nietzsche Image in Twentieth-Century America

Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen

In his 1987 best seller, The Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom argued that late twentieth-century American intellectual and cultural life was in moral disrepair. In universities and colleges, where professors had once instructed students in the serious contemplation of the good life, they now taught young minds that "reason cannot establish values, and [the] belief that it can is the stupidest and most pernicious illusion." Instead of participating in rational discourse, students were learning that values are descriptions with no correspondence to eternal truths, that language is an inadequate medium for communication, and that all knowledge and beliefs are culturally contingent. Bloom added that this wholesale "value relativism" had made its "passage from the academy to the marketplace." Americans celebrated free choice unburdened by the responsibilities of the group. He asserted that "America has no-fault automobile accidents, no-fault divorces, and it is moving with the aid of modern philosophy toward no-fault choices." Unable to accept limitations on individual striving, contemporary Americans had adopted an unwholesome, lighthearted, and softheaded "nihilism, American style." According to Bloom, this cynical quality of late twentieth-century American thought stemmed from the nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche. "This is our scene," lamented Bloom, "the spectacle consists in how [Nietzsche's] views have been trivialized by democratic man desirous of tricking himself out in borrowed finery."1	1
One might quarrel with Bloom's bleak assessment of the consequences of Nietzsche's philosophy for American culture, but his claim that Nietzsche has "conquered America" is undeniable. In higher education, Nietzsche's philosophy figures prominently in scholarly monographs, journals, and university courses in all fields of the humanities. His key phrases have been cited in our morning papers, advertisements, movies, novels, plays, and popular music. While abundant evidence supports Bloom's contention that Nietzsche has become the poster boy for postmodernism, American interest in Nietzsche has a much longer and more complicated history than he assumed. Indeed, the Nietzsche "vogue" in America (as it was referred to in the early part of the twentieth century) dates back to 1896, when the earliest English translations of his works appeared. A wide range of American readers were alternately enlivened and shocked by Nietzsche's relentless attacks on truth and morality, his pronouncement that "God is dead," and his calls for the Übermensch (superman). A survey of the early twentieth-century intellectual and cultural landscape confirms, as observers then noted, that Nietzsche starred in one of the most significant "intellectual romances" of the period: "every drawing-room can chatter about the Superman, and has an idea of what is meant by the transvaluation of all moral values." H. L. Mencken, Nietzsche's most prominent American promoter of the time, concluded that "only blockheads to-day know nothing of [Nietzsche's ideas] and only fools are unshaken by them." Within a few years after his death in 1900, Nietzsche, a self-proclaimed "good European," had also become an American phenomenon. (See figure 1.)2	2
Figure 1. Friedrich Nietzsche in 1882, at age thirty-eight. Photographed by Gustav Schultze. Following the earliest English translations of Nietzsche's works in 1896, reproductions of Schultze's photos of the German author began to circulate in American literary reviews and magazines. Reprinted from F. C. S. Schiller, "Nietzsche and His Philosophy," Book Buyer, Aug. 1896.   . . . There are about 14722 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.