Emerson, Nietzsche, and Naturalistic Ethics

George J. Stack, The Humanist; Nov 1990; 50, 6; Research Library Core Pg-21

In a letter to his friend, Franz Overbeck, Friedrich Nietzsche mentions that he is having a long essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson translated into German which casts some light on his development. Nietzsche then adds, with an almost audible sigh:

I don’t know how much I would give to effect retroactively the strict disciplining, the real scholarly education of so great and splendid a nature, with its spiritual and intellectual wealth. As it is, we have lost a philosopher in Emerson.

Although Emerson was not a technically proficient philosopher, this condescending remark is unjustified given all that Nietzsche had learned — and even appropriated — from the American poet and essayist. Surprisingly, the significant impact that Emerson had on the philosophy of Nietzsche is better known in Germany than it is in the United States, and better known by American literary critics than by American philosophers. In his notes, Nietzsche pays Emerson a rare compliment and reveals his close intellectual relationship to him. In the fall of 1881, under the heading “Emerson,” he wrote:

I have never felt myself so much at home in a book, so much in my own house as — I dare not praise it, it is so close to me.

On another occasion, Nietzsche proclaimed, “The author richest in ideas of this century has been an American,” but one who was “clouded by German philosophy.” Whether or not Emerson’s thought was “clouded” by German idealist philosophy, this did not stop Nietzsche from absorbing a significant number of Emerson’s ideas and insights, which he then amplified and enhanced. This is particularly true in regard to a set of ideas that Nietzsche incorporated into his natural history of homo natura and his naturalistic ethics — including the notion that is considered one of Nietzsche’s most volatile conceptions, the good of “evil.”

Although John Milton had something to say about the good of “evil” in Paradise Lost, and Bernard de Mandeville created a sensation with his Fable of the Bees by pointing to the public benefit of “private vices,” it is from Emerson’s writings on this issue and his belief that “nature knows how to convert evil to good” that Nietzsche derived his often misunderstood conception of the value of “evil” drives, traits, and proclivities for the development of exemplary human types — those he characterized, employing Emerson’s phrase, as “sovereign individuals” (die souveranen Individuen).

Nietzsche read and reread Emerson over a 26-year period. He frequently refers to Emerson in his early notes from 1862, copies out excerpts from his Essays in preparation for writing Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and praises Emerson once again in notes he intended to use in his autobiography, Ecce Homo. Many of Emerson’s fragmentary insights and observations on nature and human nature were assimilated by Nietzsche. Typically, he extends, enhances, and deepens Emerson’s casual remarks and asides, combining ideas that the American thinker expresses in a variety of places. He indicates a familiarity with the first and second series of Essays, Representative Men, The Conduct of Life, Solitude and Society, and some early Addresses. In his letters, he refers to Emerson, usually in a favorable way, on a number of occasions between 1866 and the mid-1880s. In some instances, he alludes to the affinity he feels for Emerson as a person and refers to him as his “soul-brother.”

Before he became familiar with Darwin’s theory of evolution, Nietzsche had already been exposed to Emerson’s rudimentary sketch of an evolutionary theory of human development. (To preserve the original tone and attitudes of the authors — both Emerson and Nietzsche direct most of their thought toward a predominantly masculine readership — I have retained their use of the term man.) He shares his pre-Darwinian understanding of the “hints of ferocity” at the heart of nature and adopts his image of the “tiger” in man. In his attempt to present a natural history of humankind, Nietzsche follows Emerson quite closely. Despite his reputation as a “genteel” writer, Emerson had a hardheaded side that Nietzsche did not fail to recognize. Emerson knew that “Nature is no sentimentalist.” Man is part of nature and is entangled in its history. In his essay “Fate,” Emerson writes:

The habit of snake and spider, the snap of the tiger and other leapers and bloody jumpers, the crackle of the bones of his prey in the coil of the anaconda, — these are in the system, and our habits are like theirs.

The project to seek a restoration of the maligned drives and instincts of humankind that Nietzsche claims as one of his tasks was strongly suggested to him by Emerson’s earlier reflections on this same question. In “Fate” and else where, Emerson insisted that the raw cruelty and instinctive drives found in “inferior species” of animals have also been inherited by man. He taught Nietzsche to see the obvious (but usually masked) fact that man lives at the expense of other species, that man is an “expensive” species that lives by exploiting its environment and ransacking the animal and vegetative kingdoms for food. Nietzsche accurately summarizes Emerson’s comments on this phenomenon when he avers that “culture rests upon a horrible foundation” and when he dramatically asserts, in a frequently misunderstood remark, that life is essentially “exploitation.” If such exploitation were removed entirely, this would entail the invention of a “way of life that would dispense with all organic functions.”

As Nietzsche is later to do, Emerson often praises whatever is “natural” and emphasizes the value for life of “instinct” and “spontaneity.” Because of his long and often dreadful natural history (which subsequent generations have inherited), and because of his capacity for reason, culture, and morality, man is characterized by the American thinker as a “stupendous antagonism.” Not only does man betray — both in his physiology and his primitive, irrational behavior — his relation to the animals, but his “new powers” (gained in civilized existence) have been won by the loss of “animal spirits.” On the one hand, man is rooted in the “elementary order” of the natural world, and, on the other hand, he possesses a capacity for thought that can “compose and decompose nature.” It is the power of thought that “takes man out of servitude.” Man is fundamentally a paradoxical being; in him, Emerson tells us, we find “god and devil, mind and matter, king and conspirator… riding peacefully together in the eye and brain.” This characterization of man as a dynamic contradiction of passion and reason, chaos and order, animal and divinity, or, in effect, nature and spirit is one that made a deep impression on Nietzsche. In fact, one of the central conceptions of that being he called (after Emerson) the “synthetic man” is directly derived from Emerson’s philosophical anthropology. For Nietzsche, too, conceives of man as an “antagonism” of drives, passions, and forces. He contends:

In man, creature and creator are united: there is in man matter, fragment, excess, clay, mud, madness, chaos; but there is also in man creator, sculptor, the hardness of the hammer, the divine spectator and the seventh day.

If we would extirpate the creature in man, Nietzsche believes, then we would destroy the creator as well. The “immoral” tendencies in man, his “striving for the forbidden,” his “adventurous courage,” his inquisitiveness, his often disguised “spiritual will to power” are all necessary spurs to creative effort, achievement, and the pursuit of “greatness.”

Throughout his Essays, Emerson sculpts in language his image of “transcendent men,” “superior chronometers,” or “synthetic” individuals who would realize the potential in man which has not yet been realized. Such human types would be able to unite dynamically the “polarities” in the self by virtue of a “strong will.” In his depiction of the person who exemplifies “wholeness,” Nietzsche adopts Emerson’s thought and language. For he maintains that “the wisest man would be the most abundant in contradictions” and the most complete individual would be one in whom “the antithetical character of existence” is embodied in a controlled, dynamic tension. This would involve the restoration of nature or natural drives in a disciplined and cultivated individual. And this is a virtual rephrasing of Emerson’s positive image of the “plus-man” or, as Nietzsche would have read it, the Uberschussmensch.

Because of their alienation from nature and their natural drives, and by virtue of their conformity and lack of self-reliance and self-trust, modern men have become, Emerson argues, of no account; they have become “the mass” and are “as alike as peas.” There is practically nothing in Nietzsche’s vituperations against modern man that cannot be found in Emerson’s writings. He laments the “quadruped interests” of the majority, its passive obedience to public opinion, its “smooth mediocrity and squalid contentment.” Whenever he gets a chance, Emerson contrasts the “imbecility” and “unintelligent brute force” of the majority with “exempts” who stand outside and above “the crowd,” who belong to the “creative class.”

In “Power,” in particular, Emerson praises the “plus-men” (such as Cellini and Michelangelo) who exude “robust health,” a “sex of mind” who are imbued with “coarse energy” and “positive power.” The “vital force” of such human types often includes what the world regards as wickedness and vice. But the “affirmative force” that is found in such rare individuals is of value even if it is allied with what is ordinarily regarded as “immorality.” To be sure, Emerson admits that this highly valuable “plus condition of mind and body” in the “strong individual” is often found in a condition of “excess which makes it dangerous and destructive.” Therefore, “absorbents” are needed to take the edge off this potentially dangerous energy or power. Emerson epitomizes his ideal human type — in whom there is a balanced intermixture of nature and culture — in his declaration:

In history the great moment is when the savage is just ceasing to be a savage… you have Pericles and Phidias, not yet passed over into the Corinthian civility. Everything good in nature and the world is in that moment of transition, when the swarthy juices still flow plentifully from nature, but their astringency or acidity is got out by ethics and humanity.

An “aboriginal might” and coarseness are attractive when they are restrained by “supreme refinement,” as in the case, Emerson believes, of Michelangelo. In such creative individuals, we often find a “natural egotism.” In fact, egotism is so often found in individuals who achieve a great deal that it seems to be a necessity of nature. Perhaps, Emerson suggests, this “natural egotism” served the “preservation of the species” so well that it became an overdeveloped passion which runs “the risk of perpetual crime and disorder.” Nonetheless, this egotism seems to have its origins in “the cardinal necessity by which each individual persists to be what he is.” Anyone familiar with the thought of Nietzsche will recognize his often repeated uncovering of the natural origin of egotism, his tracing of it to “the primordial laws of things.” Although, as in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, he despises “sick selfishness,” Nietzsche (following Emerson) sees the value of a healthy self-respect and self-regard. And he often refers to the evolved “organic” egotism that is neither immoral nor moral but an inheritance from our natural history.

Despite the fact that Emerson had been a Unitarian minister, he often raises challenging questions about traditional Judeo-Christian morality. He expresses impatience with the “thousand negatives” uttered by spokesmen for traditional religious morality and laments the conspicuous absence of “the sacred affirmative.” Emerson searches for the ascending spirit of existence and sees the value of facts and knowledge in serving “to enhance the great and constant fact of Life.” He longs for a positive morality that gives “a victory to the senses” and espouses “the affirmative principle” of life. Again and again, he asserts the need for a “new ethic” that will be natural, will celebrate life, and will liberate man from morbid introspection or religious melancholy. He wonders if modern man has not lost faith in “historical Christianity” So remote seem the teachings of such an ancient faith that it sometimes appears, Emerson writes in his “Divinity School Address,” as if “God were dead.” What particularly disturbs him is that traditional religious morality places too much emphasis on “self-accusation, remorse, and the… morals of self-denial and strife with sin.” In a number of his works, Emerson wages warfare against both a morality of weakness and a negative morality — a polemic that will be continued and amplified by Nietzsche. Emerson encourages virtues that are sharp, that have “an edge” to them. What is called “goodness” in modern society is, in fact, simply social conformity or what Nietzsche will call the “morality of custom.” A typical social “morality” demands too little of man. In his “Divinity School Address,” Emerson tells us:

We easily come up to the standard of goodness in society. Society’s praise can be cheaply secured, and almost all men are content with these easy merits.

Such typical remarks, in conjunction with his frequent attacks on the “quadruped nature” of the majority and the lamentation that “the mass” is a “calamity,” easily fuse in Nietzsche’s mind to become the “herd morality” he unsparingly criticizes. Even though Emerson never formulates such a notion, everything he says about social conformity, the tyranny of public opinion, and the “moral” domination of social groups is compatible with Nietzsche’s fulfillment of his thought.

In “The American Scholar,” Emerson laments that the majority has become “the herd” and that the habit of “self-trust” has become rare. As Nietzsche will later argue in On the Genealogy of Morals, Emerson complains that “man does not stand in awe of man,” that he has become “timid and apologetic” and has lost “his aboriginal strength.” And, as Nietzsche will do after him, Emerson links this decline in the quality of modern men to the influence of the Christian religion. He asks “whether we have not lost by refinement, by a Christianity, entrenched in establishments and forms, some vigor of wild virtue.” He proclaims that a person’s “goodness must have some edge to it, — else it is none.” The virtues that he praises — nonconformity, self-reliance, self-trust — are often joined to what he regarded as the virtue of solitude, which clearly relates his reflections to the thought of Nietzsche.

It has not been previously noticed that Nietzsche, particularly when he opposes independence of mind and existence to “herd morality,” champions the very virtues that Emerson had praised. “Independent spirituality, the will to stand alone… and self-reliance,” Nietzsche contends, are looked upon as “evil” by the majority, while the “modest, submissive, conforming mentality, the mediocrity of desires attains moral distinctions and honors.” On another occasion, Nietzsche virtually paraphrases Emerson when he says that “wicked drives” are often the derivation of “good” qualities. And, taking his cue from Emerson’s defense of the traits man has inherited from his natural history, Nietzsche insists that “everything evil, terrible, tyrannical in man, everything in him that is kin to beasts of prey and serpents, serves the enhancement of the species ‘man’ as much as its opposite does.” His advice to the authentic “free spirits” who understand this is essentially that of Emerson: become “friends of solitude.” For in “The Transcendentalist” and elsewhere, Emerson advocates solitude as a cure for the negative effects of society. Given Emerson’s hymns of praise to the solitary life, Nietzsche’s “dithyramb to solitude,” Thus Spoke Zarathustra, is suffused with the spirit of the American poet and essayist.

It is not only the basic idea of the “sublimation” of natural drives that Nietzsche derived from Emerson. For Nietzsche, the notion that mankind’s “wicked” passions and drives are the foundation of a positive morality of strength is supplemented, as it was for Emerson, by the belief that these same “wicked” passions and drives have a social value as well. In The Cay Science, Nietzsche argues that “the strongest and most wicked spirits have previously advanced mankind the most.” It is they, he continues, who “delight in the new, the adventurous, the untried.” The preachers and teachers of “the new” are imbued with this “wickedness.” In general, for both Emerson and Nietzsche, whatever is new is considered “evil” because it disrupts the familiar and the traditional. Typically, Emerson applauds what is “becoming,” leaves the past behind him, and anticipates and celebrates new beginnings, putting his faith in what Martin Heidegger will later call “the silent power of the possible.” The futurism that Nietzsche enthusiastically expresses is thus but a continuation of Emerson’s watchword: onward.

Before Nietzsche adopts it as his own, Emerson insisted on the paradox that “malfeasance” is often “turned to good.” In fact, as he tells us in “Considerations by the Way,” “most of the great results of history are brought about by discreditable means.” Nietzsche echoes this insight and adds that the utilitarians are mistaken in their belief that only what is deemed “good” contributes to the preservation and advancement of the species. Those impulses designated evil “are just in as high a degree expedient, indispensable, and conservative of the species as the good,” even though they operate in different ways. Although Nietzsche was familiar with Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees and its theme of the creation of public benefits out of private vices, it was Emerson who first insinuated this paradox in his mind.

For a former Unitarian minister, Emerson had some rather liberal attitudes toward vice. Aside from seeing “the good of evil” in the development of the individual, he also saw the value for civilization of man’s “search after power.” In his essay, “Power,” Emerson expresses admiration for individuals who have “coarse energy,” even if it is allied with vices. He enunciates what he calls “an esoteric doctrine of society” — that is, “that a little wickedness is good to make muscle… the world cannot move without rogues.” Success in the world is, he believes, often associated with “a certain plus or positive power.” It is natural for “men of sense” to desire power — that is, “power to execute their design, power to give… form and actuality to their thought.” Although Emerson is quite aware of the negative consequences of this drive for power, he is the first to show Nietzsche the positive and creative aspects of this deeply rooted psychological tendency.

Throughout his writings, Emerson refers quite often to the indirect and creative expression of humankind’s striving for power. In this way, he anticipates Nietzsche’s own conception of the spiritual expression of a “will to power” in philosophy. Emerson maintains that the thinker stamps his or her thought on the world — that Plato, for example, imprints his “copyright on the world.” The “ambition of individualism” is a formidable force in the hands of the philosopher who is, as Emerson puts it, “more than a philosopher.” Whether this drive to impress one’s being or image on the world is directed toward social action or theoretical work, it is a tendency that Emerson traces back through humankind’s natural history and even to a nisus running through nature. In this respect, as well as in others, he has obviously provided the blueprint for Nietzsche’s more elaborate and more dramatically presented theory of a universal “will to power” acting through all things.

As Emerson argues in his essay “Culture,” and as Nietzsche will reiterate in Daybreak, the typical expression of “the search after power” in the modern world is the pursuit of money. The economy of the merchant is “to spend for power and not for pleasure.” Wealth is primarily pursued “as a means of power,” not as an end in itself. Responding to the strict moralists who would extirpate these potentially dangerous or corrupting basic passions and drives from society, Emerson contends that this would be a mistake. Both the pulpit and the press, he tells us, often denounce the “thirst for wealth.” But Emerson ironically remarks:

If men should take these moralists at their word and leave off aiming to be rich, the moralists would rush to rekindle at all hazards this love of power in the people, lest civilization should be undone.

In many of his works, Emerson stresses the personal and social value of passions, instincts, and spontaneous action. He especially calls attention to the presence of these in “exceptions,” people gifted with surplus energy and “health,” the kind of creative individuals who are sorely needed “where all grows alike.” Emerson acknowledges the power of the irrational in man and finds a central place for it in what may be called his philosophical anthropology. He frequently stresses the paradoxical nature of man, as Nietzsche is later to emphasize his “antithetical nature.” Unlike Socrates or Plato, Emerson does not propose that reason should control and master our drives. Rather, he insists that a “strong will” is necessary to achieve self-mastery and self-reliance. It is not surprising that, in his notes from 1862 to 1863, Nietzsche quotes, among others, this line from “Fate”: “The one serious and formidable thing in nature is a will.” The importance of effort, “resistance,” and willing is given a priority in Emerson’s thought that will be recapitulated in the philosophy of Nietzsche.

A highly specific metaphor for man which Emerson often appeals to is directly appropriated by Nietzsche and given the same meaning. It, too, advances the notion that strong virtues and positive powers are derived from nature and are the materials out of which a “new ethic” can be forged. In “Uses of Great Men,” Emerson describes man as an “endogenous plant which grows, like the palm, from within outward.” And just as “plants convert the minerals into food for animals, so each man converts some raw material in nature to human use.” However, this “raw material” that has been transmitted to us through our natural history must be controlled, guided, cultivated, or (as Nietzsche later expresses it) “spiritualized” if it is to be put to constructive use. In Emerson’s view, there is no one who is not, at some time or other, “indebted to his vices,” just as there is “no plant that is not fed from manures.” But he insists that these natural elements or vices must be meliorated if the plant is to “grow upward and convert the base into the better nature.”

In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche employs Emerson’s metaphor for man in the same spirit. Against the desires of the “levelers” who espouse “modern ideas” that propose for man “the universal green-pasture happiness of the herd,” who blame the old social forms for all human misery, Nietzsche argues that “the ‘plant’ man has so far grown most vigorously to a height” under difficult conditions of life. His best traits were formed under pressure and constraint, were cultivated by what is most primordial and natural in him. Again and again, the “cultivation” of powerful drives, impulses, and instincts is encouraged by Nietzsche in terms of Emerson’s image of the nourishment of a plant with natural elements that will stimulate growth. Not only does Nietzsche borrow from Emerson this image of man as a plant that must root itself once again in the soil of nature in order to grow stronger, but the entire project of seeking to “translate man back into nature,” to create a naturalistic basis for a new morality of strength, was suggested to him by Emerson.

As part of his then-radical interpretation of the nature of man, Emerson not only emphasized the instinctive, spontaneous, and irrational basis of human existence, but he probed beneath the surface of man’s conscious rational life and, before Eduard von Hartmann made it popular, disclosed the power of “the unconscious.” Emerson refers to the unconscious processes that lead up to the discovery of new knowledge, arguing that, in our actions, our previous thinking “passes from the unconscious to the conscious” and that our capacity for a “new deed” remains “for a time immersed in our unconscious life.” Much of what Nietzsche says about the influence of the unconscious on our thought and behavior (including the revelation in dreams of aspects of ourselves that are normally hidden) is directly related to Emerson’s sporadic observations. Although he was familiar with von Hartmann’s metaphysics of the unconscious, Nietzsche’s stress on unconscious motivations, as well as the power of the irrational in human life, is reminiscent of Emerson’s insights. If, as I believe, the Freudian theory of sublimation is more or less derived from Nietzsche’s quite similar notion, and if Nietzsche appropriated and synthesized many of Emerson’s ideas, then Emerson was not only the inspiration for Nietzsche’s naturalistic ethics but also an unsung contributor to one of the core concepts of psychoanalytical theory.

There is strong evidence that many aspects of Nietzsche’s attempt to lay the groundwork for a naturalistic morality of growth were directly shaped by Emerson’s disparate insights and observations, as well as by his fragmentary remarks on the need for a new ethic that would not merely propose an “Iceland of negations.” Emerson sympathized with the liberating spirit of Goethe, with what he called his representation of “the impatience and reaction of nature against the morgue of conventions.” And he certainly would have approved of Nietzsche’s observation in On the Genealogy of Morals: “Man has regarded his natural propensities with an evil eye’ all too long.” Emerson venerated what was natural in the sense of the spontaneous, the free, and the open and looked with nostalgia back to the ancient Greeks. He saw them as combining a lack of excessive reflection with robust health, as strong individuals with “the grace of children” (Nietzsche, in The Birth of Tragedy, describes the ancient Greeks as “eternal children”). In his disillusionment with what had become of the Christian moral ideal, Emerson reaches back to the historical past in order to find paradigms for his new ideal of what humankind may yet become. When Nietzsche later tells us that he criticizes the “anemic” Christian ethical ideal in order to unsettle its tyranny and make room for “more robust ideals,” he only states explicitly what Emerson continually implies.

Despite his more intense language and hyperbolic expression, Nietzsche’s depiction of the value of primitive drives for a strong and positive morality (“the good of evil”), his project to restore nature in humankind, as well as his recognition of the value of the irrational in the creation of virtues with “an edge” to them, all follow Emerson’s original pattern quite closely. In fact, Emerson’s impact on European thought has been vastly understated. It may sound methodologically odd, but we gain not only a valuable insight into the genealogy of Nietzsche’s naturalistic ethics but also a better understanding of what he meant by looking back to the original template for such an ethics in the essays of the American thinker he so admired.