One day in the early 2000s, a goth teenager by the name of Sohrab Ahmari was perusing the shelves of a Salt Lake City bookstore when his gaze landed upon Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra. For a misfit atheist adolescent looking for meaning in life outside the bleak conditions of the majority-Mormon trailer park he resided in, the encounter turned out to be love at first sight. Ahmari recalls in his memoir, “To say that I ‘read’ Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra would be an understatement. I took the book home from the store, lay belly down on my bed, and finished it over three or four days, barely stepping out to eat and wash. I consumed Zarathustra, and it consumed me, in turn.”1 Soon after accepting Nietzsche as his (anti-)messiah, Ahmari became “quite literally a card-carrying communist.”2 Indeed, when the Straussian professor Allan Bloom bemoaned Nietzsche-quoting radicals on college campuses in his classic polemic The Closing of the American Mind (1987), he was referring to left-Nietzcheans like the teenaged Ahmari, those that squared Nietzsche’s aristocratic radicalism with a grand project of ultimate equality.
In the present day, however, Ahmari is no longer the angsty Nietzschean of his youth. Like most goth teenagers learn when they become adults, it was just a phase, after all. Having dropped Dionysius on his road to Damascus, Ahmari is now a Catholic convert who pens polemics against “America’s dime-store Nietzscheans.” These new Nietzscheans have somehow left the Left and have appeared on the right, taking up terminally online noms de guerre like Bronze Age Pervert and L0m3z. Yet such a dramatic difference in political usage is not surprising to those who have known the work of Nietzsche and the rich history of interpretations of his thought in the United States.
American Exceptionalism
Nietzsche once wrote that there was only ever one true Christian, and that he died on the cross. In the same vein, one can say that there was only ever one true Nietzschean, and by the time his monographs landed in American bookstores in the 1890s, he was already confined to his sister’s attic, his mind in the throes of madness after decades of battling intractable migraines. If Nietzsche had stayed sane enough to know of his burgeoning fan base across the pond, he may have delighted in this cultural exchange. After all, before Nietzsche’s work came to America, America came to him, in the form of the Transcendentalist philosophy of Ralph Waldo Emerson.
As a teen, Nietzsche had discovered Emerson’s works and read them as thoroughly as Ahmari read Nietzsche. Nietzsche and Emerson had similar life trajectories: they were both Pfarrerskinder (preacher’s children)3 who later abandoned their ministerial upbringings to launch philosophies of radical individualism. Nietzsche’s Emerson volumes were the most heavily annotated books in his personal library, with the marginalia full of praise for Emerson’s reflections on the nature of the free-spirited individual, outside tradition and convention. Nietzsche apparently saw Emerson as his “twin soul.”4
America has long served as a place where people go to break free from tradition and convention, beginning with Puritans and Quakers fleeing religious persecution5 down to present-day celebrations of America as a “nation of immigrants” and “land of opportunity.” So it is perhaps no surprise that an Emerson-inspired champion of free spirits would find an audience here.
Conversely, some American interpreters specifically embraced Nietzsche as a critic of American philistinism; they found in Nietzsche’s Teutonic profundity an escape from an America they saw as too capitalistic, democratic, Christian, and/or anti-intellectual to ever produce worthwhile philosophy.6 Thus, Nietzsche has always had a Janus-faced appeal on this side of the Atlantic: he was, on the one hand, a seemingly Americanized philosopher whose work resonated with American ideals but, on the other, a German philosopher whose superior European intellect revealed the shallowness of American culture.
The very fact that Nietzsche’s philosophy was able to inspire such contradictory interpretations points toward another aspect of American exceptionalism. The theologian Tara Isabella Burton describes how the Enlightenment reshaped Western metaphysics away from imagining humans as actors in a God-created world and toward the invention of the autonomous individual able to create one’s own destiny, thus allowing humans to “become gods.” This led to the notion of “aristocratic individualism” in western Europe, the belief that a select few “natural aristocrats” could make themselves into godlike beings. By contrast, the American ethos was shaped by democratic individualism and free market capitalism; anyone, at least in theory, could become a “self-made man” as long as he had enough entrepreneurial flair and the (Protestant) work ethic to make things happen. Thus, while European interpretations of Nietzsche often involved narratives in which an Übermensch claimed his “deserved” place in the social hierarchy, American interpretations emphasized unshackling oneself from societal constraints (such as Christian morality) and (re)creating one’s own “truth” and values in a journey of self-actualization.7
This democratic ethos is captured by the homegrown American pragmatist school of philosophy most notably espoused by William James, Emerson’s godson. Pragmatism, at the risk of oversimplification, views truth as a flexible canvas, ready to accommodate whatever beliefs prove the most useful to the truth-seeker. It is a democratizing and individualizing philosophy that allows for the value of various interpretations rather than elevating one eternal or universal truth. Many early American interpreters of Nietzsche immediately saw similarities between Nietzsche’s ideas and American pragmatism.8 The pragmatic American mind allowed for Nietzsche’s work to be utilized in whatever way the readers saw fit, and sure enough, American thinkers produced a dizzying array of interpretations.
Nietzsche also achieved a unique resonance in America because he was known for being a critic of Christianity in a country that has retained Christian belief for much longer than other Western countries. As Christian practice has fallen away in Europe, the United States—also known as Providence, the shining city upon a hill, and one nation under God—has been the one Western liberal democracy that has maintained a strong Christian culture. Fears of an impending right-wing Christian theocracy have been a common theme on the American left over the past few decades, from the Reagan-era “Moral Majority” panic to the Bush-era “theocon” scare to contemporary cris de coeur against Christian nationalism—fears that are generally absent in Western European countries, where the only feared theocracy is an Islamic one. As such, Western critics of Christianity from the Right have mostly been European thinkers such as Oswald Spengler and Dominique Venner, many of whom were practicing neo-pagans.9 While other Western countries were already operating in a post-Christian landscape,10 and thus had little use for criticisms against an irrelevant faith, the continuing relevance of Christianity in America has also meant the continuing relevance of Nietzsche as Christianity’s critic-in-chief.
