Individuality and Beyond: Nietzsche Reads Emerson by Benedetta Zavatta (review)

Three decades have elapsed since Stanley Cavell, regarding Nietzsche's debt to Emerson, remarked, "no matter how obvious to anyone who cares to verify it, it stays incredible" (Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990], 40). With this book, Benedetta Zavatta has dispelled completely and forever that aura of the incredible. The book is a great advance on the two previous monographs dedicated to the Emerson–Nietzsche connection (George Stack, Nietzsche and Emerson: An Elective Affinity [Athens: Ohio University Press, 1992], and David Mikics, The Romance of Individualism in Emerson and Nietzsche [Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003]) for the philological basis of her interpretations.

Zavatta's readings of Nietzsche are supported by his substantial Emerson marginalia and the passages of Emerson's that he copied, with variations, in a separate notebook (collected in the Nachlass as "Emerson Exemplar" and "Exzerpte aus Emersons 'Essays'" (KSA 9:13[1–22] and KSA 9:17[1–39], respectively). She establishes Nietzsche's consistent engagement with Emerson, from his school days and for the duration of his writing life, in particular by recognizing the centrality of self-cultivation in each thinker's writing, and demonstrates the considerable extent to which Nietzsche developed in conversation with Emerson, even while he diverged from the American. As protean as both writers are—and as antithetical to systematic philosophy—any scholar risks reductionism in attempting to pin down strict correspondences between them. Fortunately, this is not the author's aim. Zavatta does not give us an Emersonian Nietzsche or a Nietzschean Emerson. She is particularly instructive in bringing the American thinker into the largely German philosophical context in which Nietzsche encountered him. More importantly, in keeping with her philological approach, Zavatta restricts herself to the Emerson that Nietzsche read—and reread.

Unlike Stack, she ventures no interpretations based on Emerson's Nature, for example, as there is no evidence of Nietzsche's having read it. The Emerson volumes that Nietzsche owned and read in German translation include Essays: First and Second Series, Conduct of Life, Letters and Social Aims, and On Goethe and Shakespeare (two essays excerpted from Emerson's Representative Men for a German edition). Nietzsche's copies—he had two—of Conduct of Life, as well as On Goethe and Shakespeare, went missing at some point during the Second World War. It is worth noting, however, that Nietzsche's copy of Essays: First and Second Series (translated by G. Fabricius) is the most heavily annotated and underlined book in the Nietzsche archive in Weimar. This is all the more remarkable as it is his second copy. (His first was lost when his travel bag was stolen in 1874 while he was working on the third of his Untimely Meditations, "Schopenhauer as Educator.") As Zavatta notes, when Mazzino Montinari, preparing the Critical Edition in 1964 in Weimar, examined the extant copy, he wrote to Giorgio Colli, "Emerson is a goldmine for all our volumes!" (204). Her study proves his enthusiasm was warranted. Zavatta's meticulous research provides as detailed an account of Nietzsche's relationship to Emerson as we are likely to see.

In the first of five chapters Zavatta addresses the reception of the Emerson–Nietzsche connection, providing a detailed account of how and why the relation had been downplayed, when not outright denied, by various commentators, both American and European, for the better part of a century. The often intersecting discussions in the chapters that follow—"The Struggle Against Fate," "Self-Reliance as Moral Autonomy and as Original Self-Expression," "Society or Solitude?," and "Making and Writing History"—revisit disputed topics in Nietzsche's critical corpus.

In chapter 2, Zavatta ascribes a compatibilist account of freedom to Nietzsche, one in which "freedom" proceeds from true volition and deliberate choices. That is, Nietzsche grasps freedom from a psychological point of view while he denies the existence of free will as a...