Europe Discovers Nietzsche 349Foucault, but at no point did he seek to break free of Nietzsche, most
likely because he did not regard this attachment as a constraint.
Nietzsche's philosophical biography is a story without an end and will
need to continue being written. It remains to be described how
American pragmatism discovered the side of Nietzsche that had
declared truth the illusion that helps us cope with life. Nietzsche was
divested of his Old Wodd pathos by these pragmatists, who thought
that it is really not so bad to get by without absolute truth. Nietzsche's
dramatic "God is dead!" was laid to rest To William James, for example,
it was clear that if there is a will to power, there might as well be a will to
faith if it renders individual life richer and society more stable. When
analyzing Nietzsche, the pragmatists drew a sharp distinction between
the momentous and the utilitarian. They disregarded Nietzsche's grand-
scale political pronouncements about breeding and selection, and
focused instead on his philosophical art of self-configuration and self-
enhancement. Richard Rorty and other philosophers who have
approached Nietzsche in this way have demonstrated its effectiveness as
a means of revealing traces of benevolence in Nietzsche's sometimes
cruel philosophy.
Nietzsche was a laboratory of thinking, and he never stopped interpret-
ing himself. A powerhouse of interpretive production, he enacted the
drama of what can be envisioned and effected. In doing so, he investi-
gated the scope of what was humanly possible. All of us who regard
thinking as a central concern of life will keep coming back to Nietzsche,
and may well find that it is the colossal grand music of life that is actu-
ally haunting us.
As 1 wrote this book, I kept picturing a painting by Caspar David
Friedrich: The Monk at the Sea. An individual is standing all alone at the