Nietzsche at the Feet of Emerson: Education, Transfusion, and Transcendentalism's Living Legacy

By Nicholas Low  |  Edited by Russell C. Powell
 

When people discover that you study religion, they often ask about your religious background or what tradition you belong to. For years now, my answer to this question has been that I was raised “accidentally Transcendentalist.” That is to say, I was given texts by Thoreau and sent into the wilderness expecting to encounter the gods there. 

I did—I still do. I was effectively raised in, and remain a congregant of, the church of the woods, mountains, and waters. It didn’t occur to me to call this “Transcendentalism” until years later, but this came to feel like the best answer to the question about my own religious upbringing. I’ll return to this idea in closing, but in the meantime, I want to say a bit about my glancing scholarly encounters with this tradition, which comes now to me primarily through Friedrich Nietzsche’s education at the feet of Ralph Waldo Emerson. 

Though there has been increasing scholarly attention paid to the importance of this connection in recent years, it is still all too often passed over, both in studies of Nietzsche’s own philosophy and in estimations of Emerson’s—and therefore also Transcendentalism’s—legacy. When I think about Transcendentalism specifically as a living legacy, it makes sense to say that that legacy appears, at least in one of its aspects, under those modes of thought identified as “Nietzschean,” for better and worse.

I take it that part of what it means to ask after the “living” legacy of Transcendentalism is to consider this movement as a “tradition” that one could inherit and inhabit, worry after the future of, or openly avow. But, if Transcendentalism is a tradition that can be inherited, what exactly is it that its participants are inheriting?

Both Emerson and Nietzsche proposed complex and nuanced ideas about the meaning of education. And by “education” I mean the manner in which the wisdom or teaching of a given individual can be taught or communicated to others. Consider some excerpts from Emerson’s essay “Spiritual Laws” pertinent to his own ideas of education: 

It is a maxim worthy of all acceptation, that a man may have that allowance he takes. Take the place and attitude which belong to you, and all men acquiesce. The world must be just. It leaves every man, with profound unconcern, to set his own rate. Hero or driveller, it meddles not in the matter. It will certainly accept your own measure of your doing and being, whether you sneak about and deny your own name, or whether you see your work produced to the concave sphere of the heavens, one with the revolution of the stars.

The same reality pervades all teaching. The man may teach by doing, and not otherwise. If he can communicate himself, he can teach, but not by words. He teaches who gives, and he learns who receives. There is no teaching until the pupil is brought into the same state or principle in which you are; a transfusion takes place; he is you, and you are he; then is a teaching; and by no unfriendly chance or bad company can he ever quite lose the benefit. But your propositions run out of one ear as they ran in at the other...

This is a deeply radical proposal about the nature of education. Emerson writes cleverly that all written assertions are inadequate, even suspect. He skillfully uses words and propositions to teach that words and propositions are inadequate means of teaching. The reader may therefore contemplate, understand, even be convinced by Emerson’s claims, but Emerson the teacher warns that they will not have truly received his teaching until a kind of “transfusion” has taken place, the student becoming almost mystically identified with the teacher across time and space. 

In short, Emerson seems to be issuing a veiled invitation to somehow inhabit his living wisdom—to become him—as we read. If we fail to take up this invitation, our education remains superficial, the mere propositions running in one ear and out the other.  

Nietzsche read “Spiritual Laws” many times throughout the 1870s. In his translated copy of Emerson’s Essays (actually his second copy; his original he tragically left behind in a train car years before), in the margins next to these very paragraphs, Nietzsche wrote, “Ecce Homo,” which in 1888 became the title of his last published work. 

The possible interpretations of these marginalia are exhilarating. We might imagine that Ecce Homo, a text about “how one becomes what one is,” represents Nietzsche’s own invitation to “transfusion,” teaching through communion. We might also consider the biblical resonance of the phrase, and imagine that in Emerson’s text, Nietzsche beholds a man who teaches, like Jesus, through his conduct of life—namely, in his exemplary and enigmatic way of living and dying.     

I think this connection sheds light on Nietzsche’s own esoteric teaching strategies. His self-proclaimed Magnum Opus, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, he called “A book for all and for none.” Nietzsche says again and again throughout his corpus that his writings are masks, surfaces that both conceal and hint at unspoken profundities. Nietzsche maintained that to truly understand him required something far beyond the ordinary disciplines of reading and research. And crucially, he engaged in his infamously convoluted writing practice as a way to qualify his readers and to inoculate his works against a certain “public.” 

When Nietzsche began his writing career, he was optimistic about the possibility of a German cultural renewal through the rebirth of tragedy, a historical shift that would be brought about by Wagner’s opera and, of course, his own philosophy. He considered himself a “cultural physician,” an educator whose task was to save the philistine German public from the moral demagogues leading it astray. 

While there are numerous reasons to be suspicious of Nietzsche’s vision of a Wagnerian cultural renewal (first and foremost its ominous anticipation of the Third Reich), the point that interests me here is that it reflects an optimism that the teaching or tradition that he sought to promulgate would not only find a public, but would have a transformative educational impact on that public. This young Nietzsche was interested in Bildung, education as a force of social transformation.

However, as Nietzsche aged, fell out with Wagner, and failed to find readers, he nearly despaired of his teachings finding any public at all. And in typical late-Nietzsche fashion, he blamed his contemporaries rather than his own pedagogical shortcomings for this failure. The “herd,” as Nietzsche referred to most of his contemporaries, he believed was simply incapable of receiving his teaching, of thinking thoughts like his, and therefore would never achieve the “transfusion” of spirit required for genuine education. They were simply the wrong kind of people, “last men” ruined by the cultural and historical forces shaping them. 

This returns me to my questions about tradition. In Nietzsche’s hands, the tradition of Transcendentalist teaching cannot and should not be held responsible to a contemporary public. Rather than stooping to make itself understood, Nietzsche’s philosophy demands that the reader ascend to its level, giving proofs of initiation along the way.

In that sense, to “receive” this tradition, if it is a tradition at all, would mean to effectively become “Emerson,” or to become “Nietzsche,” which of course means to become oneself, to “become what one is.” The initiate of this tradition is not asked to be a follower, like those of Christ, but to become Christ himself, to exemplify the same originality and spiritual insight that the “founders” of the tradition accomplished. There is no place here for acolytes or adherents, no motions to go through, no precepts to learn by heart. One is instead faced with the question of whether one is capable of becoming an “educator” in the way that one’s teachers are. 

This brings me back to the confessional mode, to my own place in this “tradition.” On Monday, I plan to wake up very early, drive to Franconia Notch, and walk the Franconia Ridge Trail, which, for my money, is the most beautiful hike in New England. And I have to admit, I’m going on a Monday because I don’t want to encounter the “public” there. 

The last time I took this walk, it was crowded. There was a group of people flying drones on the summit of Lafayette. For someone who was raised to look for the gods in places like this, this is a profanation of the sacred. Seeing and hearing drones on Franconia, I felt a righteous impulse to pick up some rocks and try to snipe them out of the sky. “Some people,” I thought then and say to myself now, “just don’t get it. For them, the gods are invisible. But much, much worse than that, the gods flee before them.”

For Nietzsche, other people, the “herd,” were the ultimate obstacle to his philosophy of affirmation. Zarathustra chokes on the eternal recurrence of the “small man,” the last man, who is no longer capable of any form of transcendence, who flies drones on the summits of mountains, who thoughtlessly litters cigarette butts along roadways, and who wants most of all to remain comfortable and secure in his ways at any cost. Nietzsche’s prescription is clear: in The Gay Science, he writes, “let looking away be my only negation.” 

As for me, I mistrust this impulse to turn away, though I confess to the power it sometimes exerts over me. The gods really do flee in the profaning presence of people, of an insensible and inattentive “public.” Yet I still feel powerfully obligated to ask what my responsibility is, and what the responsibility of Transcendentalism is, to a public that is often unreceptive or openly hostile to the teachings it offers.   

Nicholas E. Low received his PhD in the Study of Religion from Harvard University in 2023. He is currently a research affiliate at the Center for the Study of World Religions and a research fellow at the Esalen Institute’s Center for Theory and Research. His current project traces the emergence of a distinctly modern vision of “philosophical religion” from European romanticism through American Transcendentalism and into Nietzscheanism, asking both about the historical conditions under which this vision arises, and investigating contemporary cultural sites where it is being either openly or subtly inhabited.