Self-Reliance as Moral Autonomy and Original Self-Expression

Chapter 3 deals with the positions taken by Nietzsche vis-à-vis Socratico-Christian morality or the morality of customs and his working-out of an alternative moral model using contributions provided to him by reading Emerson. This moral model is oriented around the process of individualization; that is, it concerns the development of the individual up to the point where he or she becomes capable of “transvaluating” the values of the tradition and living on the basis of values of his or her own. Nietzsche identifies the criterion of this “transvaluation” in the virtue that Emerson calls self-reliance. This includes various attitudes which Nietzsche personifies in three figures: “Schopenhauer as Educator,” who personifies self-reliance qua faith in one’s own intuitions and nonconformism; the “free spirit” qua “wanderer,” who personifies self-reliance as an intellectual method, that is, as openness to confronting views different from one’s own and placing one’s own self in question; and Zarathustra, who personifies self-reliance as original self-expression.

The Struggle against Fate

This chapter examines the influence that reading Emerson had on Nietzsche’s treatment of the theme of fate and free will, which is closely tied to two other central themes in Nietzsche’s philosophy: the theme of moral responsibility for one’s own actions, and that of the construction of one’s character, or self-creation. Though rejecting Emerson’s metaphysical assumptions regarding the freedom of the will and of thought, Nietzsche used certain suggestions provided to him by Emerson to work out an account of freedom as agency whereby to be free is not to act in a completely unconditioned way but rather to act as master of one’s own drives and guided by one’s own values. This chapter also examines the feeling of freedom which Nietzsche describes as the feeling of the preponderance of one’s own force vis-à-vis the force of external circumstances. Thanks to his reading of Emerson, Nietzsche comes to consider this feeling as compatible with the perception of necessity or the presence of immutable facts in one’s own life.

The Reception of the Emerson-Nietzsche Relation

Chapter 1 investigates the reasons why the Emerson-Nietzsche relationship tended to be played down, where it was not frankly and entirely denied, for almost a century. This is not a matter of chance but rather the sign of a long-protracted political and cultural hostility between Germany and the United States, with Nietzsche and Emerson being elevated to the status of cultural icons in their respective countries. This chapter considers the reception of Emerson in Europe during Nietzsche’s lifetime and the stereotype of Emerson as an Idealist mystic, innocently optimistic and unaware of social problems that had become disseminated there. Also considered is the reception of Nietzsche in the United States and the myth of his complicity in Nazism—a myth exploded only after the publication, from the end of the 1960s on, of the Critical Edition of his works and private notes.

Conclusion

In this concluding section, based on the analysis conducted in previous chapters, it is argued that the reading of Emerson influences the development of the most important themes of Nietzsche’s philosophy, although the position of the latter thinker comes eventually to diverge in an important way from that of the former. It is further argued that Nietzsche’s attraction to Emerson is also due to an affinity of character, which explains the fact that Nietzsche uses Emerson’s philosophy as a vademecum for the conduct of his life. Understanding friendship in Emerson's manner as a kind of “attraction at a distance” or encounter-cum-confrontation between different individualities, Nietzsche defines Emerson as a true friend who, throughout his life, continuously spurred and encouraged him to become what he was.

Making History and Writing History

This chapter examines the role played by Emerson in the development of Nietzsche’s position regarding history and historiography from the second Untimely Meditation up to the middle period works. Drawing inspiration from Emerson, Nietzsche takes a stance contrary to the theory of active forgetting that he had previously maintained and finds an alternative to the historicism of his age in an active and empathic reading of history in which events are relived “in the first person.” The precondition for developing this type of reading is the virtue that Emerson calls self-reliance, understood as a reverence for oneself and for one’s own task. This chapter also considers Emerson’s contribution to the critique of the metaphysical notion of genius and of the “cult of the hero.” Clarifying the genesis of this critique allows us to clarify in turn Nietzsche’s position regarding the theory of moral and political perfectionism.

Society or Solitude?

Chapter 4 considers the influence exerted by Nietzsche’s reading of Emerson on the former’s critique of the morality of compassion and on his working out of a moral proposal alternative to this modelled on the relation of friendship. Emphasizing the value of individualism for the well-being of the collective, Emerson brings Nietzsche to understand that pursuing one’s personal advantage, if it is correctly understood, not only does not conflict with the welfare of society but nourishes and supports it. On this basis, Nietzsche on the one hand develops a critique of compassion and altruism as forms of the loss of the self and humiliation of the other, while on the other hand reassessing the value of egoism or, better put, distinguishing egoism as the pursuit of pleasure from a “higher egoism” that consists in pursuing one’s own vocation. Friendship is the relation that best sustains the development both of one’s own and others’ individualities.