“If Nietzsche’s image reached its
nadir during the Second World War, when Hitler presented Mussolini with a bound
edition of his works and the historian Crane Brinton wrote a book asserting he
would have been “a good Nazi,” a resurrection was soon to come. The German émigré
and Princeton professor Walter Kaufmann almost single-handedly revived his
standing with his many translations and forceful reminder that Nietzsche hated
anti-Semites and German nationalists as well as woolly-headed romantics.
Kaufmann’s Nietzsche was a late flower of the Enlightenment, a tough-minded
rationalist with the courage to face the Darwinian revelation that there is no
purpose to nature or to our existence. The true task of the overman was to
overcome himself, not others, and to do so by sculpturing his impulses and
thoughts and inheritances into a willed unity that could be called “style.”
(...)
For Bloom and other students of
Leo Strauss, however, Nietzsche was not just the disease, he was also the
diagnostician and possibly the cure. More brilliantly than anyone, Nietzsche
understood the peril of modern nihilism and the need to cultivate robust souls
who would strive to achieve excellence without authoritative religious belief.
(...)
If Nietzsche was terrible, was he
also beneficial? In a 1985 book “Nietzsche: Life as Literature,” the Princeton
philosopher Alexander Nehamas argued that Nietzsche’s perspectivism does not
imply that all beliefs are equally valid but that “one’s beliefs are not, and
need not be, true for everyone.” On this reading, to fully accept a set of
beliefs is to accept the values and way of life that are bound up with it, and
since there is no single way of life that is right for everyone, there may be
no set of beliefs that is fit for everyone. At its best, American individualism
is not about the aggrandizement of the self or the acquiescent assumption that
everybody simply has a right to think what they want. Rather, it stresses that
our convictions are our own, and should be held as seriously as any other possessions.
Or, as Nietzsche imagined philosophers would one day say, “ ‘My judgment is my
judgment’: no one else is easily entitled to it.”
Alexander Star, book review of American Nietzsche - a History of an Icon and His Ideas, 2011, in The New York Times, Jan 15, 2012.
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