A book previously written in German by Stanley Hubbard had established that Nietzsche had read Emerson's Essays, underlined them and quoted from them in several of his books. It is the opinion of George J. Stack that the great American sage of Concord was more than simply words upon a page for Nietzsche, who is widely studied by those who have some interest in philosophy. As a professor of philosophy (chair of that department at the State University of New York at Brockport, according to the back cover of this book), Stack sees how the important elements of philosophy can be pulled from Nietzsche's works as from a house of cards, and the entire deck can be handed over to Ralph Waldo Emerson. One of his points about Emerson: "Quite often he attacks social institutions, freely knocking down the `house of cards' of which, he believes, they are made. Society is viewed as at war with individuals, as a leveling force that resents genuinely independent people." (p. 37) The major fault of this book is its failure to realize how long philosophy has been pulling the same trick, with similar results, on different houses of cards.

Perhaps this book reflects a level of scholarship that has no qualms about being in a young country, based on a single language. It is easy here to forget that Nietzsche was born in Germany, as was Walter Kaufmann (1921-1980), an American professor who allowed his students to know when the ideas that they acquired had a German background. Nietzsche was once a young professor lecturing on the ancient Greeks, and it is most surprising here to find Stack criticizing Kaufmann for calling attention to a Greek, Aristotle, in the midst of Nietzsche's thoughts on "greatness of soul." In Stack's opinion, "his portrait of greatness owes far more to Emerson than to Aristotle." (p. 298) Perhaps Emerson, in a more modern setting, was able to put the idea of greatness into words which it was easier for Stack, a thoroughly modern professor, to understand, while Aristotle was having to put the concept into word that his pupil, Alexander the Great, could apply in practice when Alexander was king from the age of 20 until his death at the age of 33. Stack shows a very liberal idea of leadership when he reports, "Alexander the Great's intense desire for military conquest is mild compared to Plato's intellectual `ambition.'" (p. 156) Stack knows this because of something that he read on page 317 of The Portable Emerson.

Emerson also wrote, in "Of Friends," about friendship, a topic which has been a classic since Florian wrote "My friends, there are no friends." I believe I found this on page 46 of POLITICS OF FRIENDSHIP by Jacques Derrida, translated by George Collins (1997) as well as on page 48 this book by Stack, whose sage is always Emerson. So many times, when Stack is thinking of Emerson, the real experience is one of Nietzsche, and "One can understand, Nietzsche writes, the bitter remark of `the sage': `Friends, there are no friends.'"

In my own experiences, instead of doing this, I should be working on THE NEW VIETNAM WAR COMEDY TEAM JOKE BOOK. In my humble opinion, Nietzsche and I would make a better comedy team in a joke book than Emerson and I could ever be. Possibly Stack never meant to have Nietzsche and Emerson evaluated as a comedy team. I'm not recommending it.

I'm much more excited about this book than the first time I reviewed it. It was written back in 1992, and I could have considered it one of the most American studies of Nietzsche to be produced in the late 20th century. What made my first review exciting was how well I managed to ghost Walter Kaufmann in writing that review. Kaufmann had chosen to be a professor in the philosophy department of a great American university, at a time when cultured people everywhere might expect a modern philosophy to be enthralled with the idea of philosophy forming a basis for world order striving for the kind of educated greatness enhanced by Emerson. Since reading more of Emerson, I must rate him more highly than in my first review of this book, particularly in his work on Plato. Nietzsche might join Emerson in the view "the bitten world holds the biter fast by his own teeth." That is what Emerson noticed after: "so all this mammoth morsel has become Plato. He has clapped copyright on the world." Walter Kaufmann and I may have differed from each other generationally in our views on how well rock 'n' roll might also claim the world. Philosophy is much more difficult to discuss than the most recent songs, and the people who might read this book for professional reasons wouldn't have much excitement to talk about, so the years passed this book by in stony silence until I came along and compared it to what Walter Kaufmann said about this kind of simple comparison of the views of another with Nietzsche. Hegel set the standard for making philosophical comparisons, and Kaufmann kept trying to show how German this approach is. I really liked the idea of Kaufmann having an American alter ego who was going to make decisions based on the line, "Common, it'll be fun." This worked for me better after I tried it than before.

Only recently I came across Stack's Nietzsche and Emerson and was intrigued by the linking of the radical German philosopher and the supposedly "genteel" American poet and essayist. It came as a surprise to see how much R.W. Emerson influenced Nietzsche in regard to many themes - the will to power, fate, the way unvirtuous drives are converted into good traits or consequences, the aesthetic ideal of the "beyond-man," and much more. Apart from some repetitions of themes and terms, Stack has done a solid job -- scholarly, but not tedious -- in making his case. One thing this book does is to give us a very different and much more radical picture of Emerson. At the same time, Stack takes some of the shine off Nietzsche's reputed super-originality. The philosophy in N & E is accessible and the discussions of Emerson's insights are revealing and supported by many references to the Essays of the writer who has been called the "quintessential American" literary hero. For a comparative study, Stack's book manages to break new ground and go beyond the typical academic effort. I'd recommend it highly as illuminating where some of Nietzsche's thinking came from and placing a neglected American literary philosopher in a new, dramatic light. As far as I know, this is the only book length treatment of this rich topic in English.