doi: 10.1093/pq/pqaa034
BOOK REVIEW
Individuality and Beyond: Nietzsche Reads Emerson. By Benedetta Zavatta (trans.
Alexander Reynolds). (Oxford: OUP, 2019. Pp. 265. Price £55.00. ISBN:
978-0-19-092921-3 hbk.)
With this book, Bendetta Zavatta has written the finest study published to date
of Nietzsche’s appreciation of, and relation to, Emerson. Two reasons account
for her achievement. First, she is an astute and careful reader of both thinkers
and writers; and, secondly, she does not impose phantasmatic readings on
Nietzsche but has admirably yielded herself to the task of cultivating a rich
appreciation of the subtle and delicate character of his thought by reading him
closely and attentively. This makes her, for the most part, a reliable and hugely
instructive reader of the aphorisms and of Nietzsche’s corpus as a whole,
including showing an awareness of his complex intellectual development. In
addition, she does not seek to impose an abstract or alien philosophical agenda
on Nietzsche, and neither does she simply assimilate the two thinkers to each
other: She neither makes Emerson sound more Nietzschean than he is—the
error of George Stack’s study of the two, published in 1992 as Nietzsche and
Emerson: An Elective Affinity—nor does she make Nietzsche more Emersonian
than he actually is. She locates in both an abiding concern with self-cultivation
and shows the full extent to which the two thinkers, one located in the heart of
Europe and the other located in a new America, can be appreciated in terms of
a shared project of thinking, in bold and innovative ways, a new individuality.
A chief reason for the success of the book is the fact that the author has so
exactingly studied Nietzsche’s copies of Emerson’s texts with their underlinings
and marginal comments, along with his notebooks and sketches from the
Nachlass, in which, and throughout his entire lifetime, Emerson is a constant
point of reference and major source of inspiration. (It is worth noting that the
copy of Emerson’s Essays, which is available to readers for consultation today
is not the original copy Nietzsche had, but one he replaced at a later date and
after this copy was lost when he had his luggage stolen in the summer of 1874.)
Although the book is not without its flaws and some significant lacunae, it can
be strongly recommended to anyone with an interest in Nietzsche’s relation to
C The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Scots Philosophical Association and the University of
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The Philosophical Quarterly Vol. 0, No. 0
ISSN 0031-8094
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Emerson and in the ethics of self-cultivation. In truth, though, it is a book that
merits the attention of all serious readers of Nietzsche.
The book is divided into five main chapters. The first chapter covers the
reception of the Emerson–Nietzsche relation by various commentators in the
twentieth century, noting how divided opinions have been as to the significance
of an appreciation of Emerson for an understanding of Nietzsche. The great
achievement of Zavatta’s book is that, owing to her close and exacting reading
of the materials of Nietzsche, this question is now rendered a great deal
less speculative. Here she has been inspired by Mazzino Montinari’s view that
establishing one’s interpretation on a solid philological basis is not the antithesis
but rather the necessary premise and precondition of philosophical reflection
and engagement. In this opening chapter, she also helpfully notes that it was
not the ‘first’ Emerson that Nietzsche initially became acquainted with and
came to be inspired by—the Emerson of his first publications, such as the
classic book Nature of 1836, and where he presents himself, in Zavatta’s words,
as a ‘transfiguring mystic’—but rather the ‘second’ Emerson, namely, the
Emerson of The Conduct of Life, published in 1860 and translated into German
in 1862, and featuring the essays on ‘Fate’ and ‘Power’. Nietzsche came to
know well in the course of time the first and second series of Emerson’s Essays,
but Zavatta maintains that the ‘mystical’ Emerson was largely unknown to
Nietzsche and would have been an anathema to his antimetaphysical and
antimystical bent, and that comes to the fore in his published writings with
Human, all too Human, published in 1878 and, as the later Nietzsche observed,
represents ‘the monument of a crisis’ (Ecce Homo).
In Chapters 2–5, Zavatta instructively covers several key topics in thinking about the Nietzsche–Emerson relation, including fate and freedom; selfreliance as moral autonomy and as original self-expression; society and solitude; and ending with a final chapter on making and writing history. There
is much to admire throughout the book in terms of its appreciation of both
thinkers, and especially the quality of the felicitous and studious interpretations offered of Nietzsche’s aphorisms. She is superb, for example, in her
interpretation of Nietzsche’s aphorisms on friendship and in her reading of
the highly enigmatic discourse ‘On the Sublime Ones’ in Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
She judiciously negotiates her interpretations in relation to other readings of
the aphorisms in question, and in almost every case her appreciation is the
superior one. Having noted the enormous strengths of the book, there are
weaknesses and lacunae. I shall restrict myself to pointing out one of each.
At a number of places in the book, Zavatta refers to something she calls
the values of ‘Socratico-Christian morality’, but it is unclear why Socrates and
Christianity are linked in this way. I say this because of the way Nietzsche
figures Socrates in his middle texts, such as The Wanderer and His Shadow (1880)
and Dawn (1881). In these texts, Socrates is prized by Nietzsche as a thinker
who dedicated philosophy not to the task of coming up with a universalist
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morality but rather, and as an exception to the rule in philosophy, to a focus
on the ethics of self-care and self-mastery (D 9). Moreover, Socrates, says
Nietzsche, practised this way of life seriously but also cheerfully and with
much playful wisdom. For Nietzsche, it is on account of the style with which
Socrates practises philosophy that we can see the advantages he has for us, as
modern free spirits, over the founder of Christianity (WS 86). In the book, the
author makes extensive use of Nietzsche’s neglected middle writings, so it is
odd that she has overlooked this particular appreciation of Socrates that we
find in them.
In the text, Zavatta has some interesting things to say about Nietzsche as a
sceptic and his commitment to developing a curious-sounding ‘scepticism of
strength’, and that is explicitly articulated in these terms by him in Beyond Good
and Evil (BGE). There, in aphorisms 208–209, he makes a contrast between
‘weak scepticism’ and ‘strong scepticism’. I find Nietzsche’s treatment of the
two scepticisms to be problematic and unconvincing. First, he argues that weak
scepticism comes about as a complex physiological condition whenever races
and classes that have long been kept apart start to mix—this is a mixing he
positively welcomes and affirms the necessity of in Volume 1 of Human, All too
Human, which is when he first begins to embrace the fact that us moderns are
now living in a sceptical age. So, here we need to know why Nietzsche has so
dramatically changed his mind, and Zavatta does not notice the change and so
is unable to instruct us. Secondly, Nietzsche paints a picture of weak scepticism
in broad brushstrokes, referring to a paralysis of the will and a disease of the
will, and in the process lumping together in an arbitrary manner the likes
of Hamlet, Montaigne, and Socrates. Although the reference to Hamlet is
an interesting one on Nietzsche’s part, Montaigne, it can be safely said, was,
like Nietzsche, a special kind of sceptic and hardly a figure suffering from a
paralysis of the will and so incapable of making decisions! This is relevant to
the appreciation Zavatta develops in this study simply because Emerson wrote
an important essay on Montaigne as a sceptic that interestingly identifies
Montaigne’s special kind of scepticism as a free-minded and experimental
one, and it would have been instructive to have this brought into the picture
and related to Nietzsche’s inadequate treatment in the aphorisms on weak
and strong scepticisms in BGE. Although it seems certain that Nietzsche did
not know this essay on Montaigne by Emerson since the volume of Emerson’s
in which it appeared—Representative Men—was only partially translated into
German in the form of translating only, and as a separate text, the two essays
on Goethe and Shakespeare, it would have been instructive to compare the
negotiations with, and appropriations of, scepticism we find in both Emerson
and Nietzsche. References to versions of scepticism, including Pyrrhonism and
other forms, abound in Emerson’s writings.
One thing that clearly emerges from this study is that Nietzsche was a
selective reader of Emerson. At one point in her book, Zavatta claims that
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BOOK REVIEW
University of Warwick, UK
Keith Ansell-Pearson
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Nietzsche was perhaps Emerson’s ‘best reader’, but this is an unnecessarily
extravagant contention. Moreover, one could argue that today it is the first
Emerson that is most pertinent to our contemporary reality—e.g. the need for
an ecological conscience in the face of a global situation of climate change
and the widespread devastation of nature—and that whilst the concern with
self-reliance and self-cultivation will, one hopes, never go out of fashion, such a
care of the self needs to be allied to a care of life, including nature, as a whole for
without this latter care the former simply cannot be sustained and practised.
It is perhaps not surprising that today we are witnessing such a renaissance
of interest—along with a renewed philosophical appreciation of Thoreau—in
Emerson’s writings on nature (see, for example, ‘The Best Read Naturalist’: Nature
Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, edited by Michael P. Branch & Clinton Mohs,
2017). It is simply an evasion to label these writings ‘mystical’, and we will be
intellectual and moral fools if we ignore the lessons Emerson was seeking to
impart in these writings, and in which reflections on ‘nature’ are an abiding
concern he has from the first to last.