Researchers in religious studies, political theory, economics, and history have drawn attention to the dialectical emergence of modern capitalism along with new ways of being-in-the-world and understandings about what constitutes a full and free life. Max Weber’s classic text on the emergence of modern capitalism in Protestant contexts argues that Protestant understandings of predestination, faith, and secular asceticism supported ways of being-in-the-world and working that are highly conducive to the emergence of modern capitalism. Mark C. Taylor’s Speed Limits continues Weber’s line of thought, arguing that the obsession with convenience and accumulation, and the understanding that the hand of God has been replaced by the invisible hand of the market, have given rise to a postmodern finance capitalism that is decoupled from reality. In his recent work, Nobel Prize winning economist Edmund Phelps argues that the emergence of a modern, dynamic capitalism in the U.S. during the nineteenth century was made possible and supported by the displacement of traditional communitarian values by emerging modern values centered around individualism and self-expression. Taken together, the general sense is of the emergence of a new egoistical individualism shaped by and shaping the capitalist culture that emerged in the U.S. during the nineteenth century. This modern subject’s greed, vanity, and aversion to pain have brought the modern world to the precipice of economic, political, and ecological disaster.
This dissertation brings together Ralph Waldo Emerson and Friedrich Nietzsche, two philosophers who have been read as prophets of a strong modern individualism, but who I claim require society as much as solitude. Emerson is well known for his philosophy of self-reliance, but the meaning of self-reliance has often been misinterpreted as self-sufficiency, as in the ideal of the self-made man, and as a foundation of egoism and narcissism in U.S. culture. Due to his emphasis on the development of the individual human, Emerson has been seen as offering little in the way of ethical or political concern for other people. He has been widely critiqued for his alleged failure to respond in meaningful ways to slavery and the Civil War. Nietzsche’s individualism has led to his ejection from conversations of politics and ethics. More dramatically, misreadings of his individualism led to his appropriation by twentieth and twenty-first century fascists. Nietzsche was so popular among twentieth century fascists that Adolf Hitler is said to have gifted the collected works of Nietzsche to Mussolini on his birthday. Bringing together Emerson and Nietzsche not only helps to correct their egoistic images, but it also contributes to the ongoing exploration of Emerson’s influence on Nietzsche, who, according to Cavell, was Emerson’s greatest nineteenth century reader. This research thus positions Emerson as an important fountainhead for modern European philosophy, in the fields of phenomenology and existentialism.
Reading Emerson and Nietzsche on friendship, I uncover the existential, ethical, and political ways that friends contribute to one’s capacities to think and to be oneself, and thus to be free in a real and meaningful way. I show how Emerson and Nietzsche identify the emergence of a modern egoism supported by capitalist choice and consumption and how they respond through the articulation of a strong individualism that finds freedom in commitment and friendly relationships with other people. In uncovering the role of friendship in Emerson and Nietzsche, I bring to light ethical and political considerations related to neighborliness, vanity, agonism, conversation, pain, hospitality, and love.
