Naturalism and Religion: A European Perspective

My aim in this article is to explore ways in which American thought influenced and transformed European understandings of nature. The framework of such an attempt is a transatlantic history of ideas. I focus on two examples, in which I turn to texts by Friedrich Nietzsche and Rudolf Otto. My argument consists of four parts.

I. Nietzsche’s Schopenhauer and Emerson’s Concept of Nature

From as early as the end of the nineteenth century, Nietzsche has been read as a critic of naturalism and his philosophy of art as a defense of radical subjectivity.¹ While the diagnosis of a philosophy of radical subjectivity is appropriate, the purported opposition to naturalism is a fallacy. Because Nietzsche only expresses himself in aphoristic or essayistic forms, however, it is not an easy task to connect the traces of his (at least temporary) position. For this task, his third Untimely Meditation, “Schopenhauer as Educator,” published in 1876, proves particularly illuminative.²

At first glance, this eulogy for Arthur Schopenhauer seems to have little to do with the topic of nature and religion. Indeed, Nietzsche’s early reception of Schopenhauer—whose philosophy had been nearly forgotten in the political, economic, and scientific success of Germany at the time—contains his polemic critique of the culture of his time as an age of anonymous mass society that destroys every individual lifestyle. He recommends Schopenhauer as “teacher and taskmaster” against this “inhuman chapter of history;”³ against the “lazy” and the “generation dominated by public opinion” in order to relearn the question of how to live.⁴

In the midst of overwhelming industrialization, Schopenhauer exhorts that humans are not “factory products.”⁵ Instead they need the courage “to live according to their own laws and standards.”⁶ He reminds us that “we are responsible to ourselves for our own existence.”⁷ But all of these challenges issued in Nietzsche’s rehabilitation of Schopenhauer are spoken as through a mask, for Nietzsche finds the path to Schopenhauer himself only by a detour, namely through his formative reading of Emerson.

It is not only the familiar diction and the related topoi that serve as reminders of Emerson’s essays “Self-Reliance” or “Nature,” which Nietzsche had read intensively.⁸ Even the framework of a pedagogical reflection on the model of an educator, which Nietzsche adopts for his Schopenhauer essay, finds its parallel in Emerson’s famous speech “The American Scholar.”⁹ The traces of such connections are not a matter of mere speculation. Nietzsche’s intensive Emerson reception has been reconstructed by his annotated copy of Emerson’s essays, and perhaps more importantly, Nietzsche both opens and closes his text on Schopenhauer programmatically with direct references to Emerson.

With the opening quotation, Nietzsche again invites the reader to go “on the single path along which no one can go but you,” but he remains silent about the name of the author he cites and instead asks cryptically: “Who was it who said: ‘a man never rises higher than when he does not know whither his path can still lead him?’”¹⁰ As you might know, the expression is to be found at the end of Emerson’s essay “Circles.”¹¹

At the conclusion of his eighty page essay on Schopenhauer, Nietzsche then returns to Emerson, and this time mentions him by name. He decries the decay and the disenchantment of the philosophical life in his age. Instead of providing a “source of the heroic,” it has degenerated into mere “lecture-hall wisdom” and “lecture-hall cautiousness.”¹² Why is “philosophy presently so ill-respected,” he inquires and does not hesitate with an answer: it is the “university philosophy,” which has forgotten “dangerous thinking.” Nietzsche’s essay aims at carrying this philosophy to its grave and sealing it with the epitaph “it disturbed nobody.”¹³

It should be noticed, that Nietzsche no longer invokes Schopenhauer for his programmatic exhortation against the academization of philosophy, but rather “an American:” “Let an American tell them what a great thinker who arrives on this earth signifies as a new centre of tremendous forces. ‘Beware,’ says...