CUNY Academic Commons

This article by Nietzsche scholar Mason Golden covers Nietzsche’s marginalia on his German language translations of Emerson’s texts. The connection between Nietzsche and Emerson is interesting as a philosophical alignment of Anglo-American pragmatism (or proto-pragmatism) and continental thought. I became interested in the connection when writing on Borges and William James; Borges, like Golden, highlights the outsized influence that Emerson exerted on Nietzsche and the relative dearth of actual in-depth exploration of this influence. Borges is fond of citing a particular instance of Nietzsche’s open admiration for Emerson in a few phrases posthumously published in fragments that never found their way into The Gay Science: “”Emerson. I have never felt so much at home in a book, so much in my own house as,–I ought not to praise it; it is too close to me.” The widely divergent temperaments of the two writers make this admission almost shocking, but Golden does a good job of demonstrating the close relations between their texts, emphasizing the “intellectual nomadism” common to their thought and their reliance on the radically experimental essay form. I found the article through a simple Project Muse search.