Nietzsche’s First Man: Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Nietzsche has little unqualified good to say about individual modern philosophers—save one: Ralph Waldo Emerson.”

“Listen to me!  . . . Do not, above all confound me with what I am not.” Friedrich Nietzsche’s plea, of course, was in vain. Even while alive but in a state of complete mental collapse, his sister began an egregious misappropriation of his writings. She cultivated and perpetrated readings of Nietzsche sympathetic to German nationalism and anti-Semitism. This “German Nietzsche” as the avatar of the Aryan superman has generally collapsed, and after the fall of the Third Reich a reassessment of Nietzsche began.

In the latter part of the 20th century a wholly new interpretation has emerged. Nietzsche has become the avatar of a world without God and the prophet of postmodern relativism. In a great feat of intellectual alchemy, Nietzschean skepticism has been fused with Marxist social consciousness to produce Progressive gold. What Harold Bloom calls “French Nietzsche” has swept through Academia and is now in its latter orthodoxical iterations.

He often appears to contradict himself, and he makes no attempt to reconcile his seemingly disparate views. Nietzsche as philosopher is, therefore, difficult to place into any kind of historical continuity.

Nietzsche has been described as a philosopher who is easy to read but difficult to understand. This is, at least in part, because of his seemingly fragmented and provocative aphoristic style and his disinclination to articulate any kind of philosophical system. He often appears to contradict himself, and he makes no attempt to reconcile his seemingly disparate views. Nietzsche as philosopher is, therefore, difficult to place into any kind of historical continuity and, in fact, he himself is often critical if not dismissive of the great philosophers of his age: Jean Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, John Stewart Mill, Arthur Schopenhauer, and so on. At some point, many end up on the barb of his ruthless wit. And Nietzsche never even mentions Karl Marx by name, while routinely denouncing the emergent socialistic movements as resentful secular Christian heresies. Nietzsche has little unqualified good to say about individual modern philosophers—save one: Ralph Waldo Emerson.