Hi, thanks for this, interesting and well-written. I’m working my way through Nietzsche but am much more familiar with Emerson. Their closeness keeps coming up for me as I’m reading.
As far as I know Emerson did not have the literal severe swinging of moods that Nietzsche did in his life — Emerson was known for his serenity — but the much-discussed rhetorical polarities of “freedom” and “fate” in his essays are basically fully applicable to what you’re describing here. “Hyperbole” and “irony” would fit easily into the many different ways Emerson makes tropes of these two moods. I wouldn’t necessarily call it a therapeutic method for Emerson, but it is aimed at a kind of self-recovery. Have you spent much time with Emerson? The parallels are fascinating!
Also, the poet Hart Crane, who read Nietzsche closely, is maybe the king of hyperbole in poetry, but plays at being the clown too.
Yes, the parallel with Emerson is quite apt! To me, Emerson’s influence on Nietzsche comes out most powerfully in “Schopenhauer as Educator.” I do think that what Nietzsche gets from Emerson here is an idea of culture as a kind of therapeutic practice aimed at transforming experiences of shame. Nietzsche is thinking about shame as a response to the failure to realize one’s ambitions, and the relation to the educator as a “genius” who helps the self reclaim itself from shame. As Nietzsche puts it, learning to feel ashamed at one’s own failures, conformism, or cowardice “without any corresponding feeling of distress” - this kind of impersonal shame - is a sign of one’s “consecration to culture.” Culture here figures as a project of moral perfectionism, aimed at unleashing those conditions under which the “saint, artist, and philosopher” in the human being can flourish. If you’re interested in the parallels, I’d recommend checking out Stanley Cavell’s Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: the Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism and James Conant’s “Nietzsche’s Perfectionism.”
Ah thanks, this is very illuminating. I started Cavell's Emerson's Transcendental Etudes recently, but I will definitely be going to the one you mentioned as well. He is maybe the best Emerson commentator I've found.
Hi, thanks for this, interesting and well-written. I’m working my way through Nietzsche but am much more familiar with Emerson. Their closeness keeps coming up for me as I’m reading.
As far as I know Emerson did not have the literal severe swinging of moods that Nietzsche did in his life — Emerson was known for his serenity — but the much-discussed rhetorical polarities of “freedom” and “fate” in his essays are basically fully applicable to what you’re describing here. “Hyperbole” and “irony” would fit easily into the many different ways Emerson makes tropes of these two moods. I wouldn’t necessarily call it a therapeutic method for Emerson, but it is aimed at a kind of self-recovery. Have you spent much time with Emerson? The parallels are fascinating!
Also, the poet Hart Crane, who read Nietzsche closely, is maybe the king of hyperbole in poetry, but plays at being the clown too.
Yes, the parallel with Emerson is quite apt! To me, Emerson’s influence on Nietzsche comes out most powerfully in “Schopenhauer as Educator.” I do think that what Nietzsche gets from Emerson here is an idea of culture as a kind of therapeutic practice aimed at transforming experiences of shame. Nietzsche is thinking about shame as a response to the failure to realize one’s ambitions, and the relation to the educator as a “genius” who helps the self reclaim itself from shame. As Nietzsche puts it, learning to feel ashamed at one’s own failures, conformism, or cowardice “without any corresponding feeling of distress” - this kind of impersonal shame - is a sign of one’s “consecration to culture.” Culture here figures as a project of moral perfectionism, aimed at unleashing those conditions under which the “saint, artist, and philosopher” in the human being can flourish. If you’re interested in the parallels, I’d recommend checking out Stanley Cavell’s Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: the Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism and James Conant’s “Nietzsche’s Perfectionism.”
Ah thanks, this is very illuminating. I started Cavell's Emerson's Transcendental Etudes recently, but I will definitely be going to the one you mentioned as well. He is maybe the best Emerson commentator I've found.