Truth and lie in Emily Dickinson and Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche has long been associated with Emerson, but the ruptures he opens in Western philosophical culture find surprising echoes in another of his contemporaries, Emily Dickinson. Nietzsche and Dickinson are contrasting figures in many ways, including place (although not time), language, and religion; Nietzsche’s background is Lutheran, in a period of increasing positivism, while Dickinson lived in the intense period of the Second Great Awakening and its wrestling match with Calvinism. Nietzsche was an intellectual trained in German and Swiss cultural centers; Dickinson spent her life in a small town in Western Massachusetts, although she benefited there from new educational opportunities for women. Indeed, not least, is their difference in gender and of attitudes towards it: Dickinson’s work has emerged as a major voice exploring women’s identities in nineteenth-century America, while in Nietzsche, “woman” remains a complex and highly equivocal figure.

Yet there are likenesses. Neither married, although in Dickinson’s case this is seen as eccentric deviation while for Nietzsche it is a philosophical self-affirmation (as he said in The Gay Science: “What great philosopher has ever been married?” III: 7). Dickinson lived reclusively with her family in her Amherst home. Nietzsche’s life was one of illness and isolation until his collapse into mental breakdown in 1889, which left him an invalid in the care of his sister and mother. In both cases, the posthumous writings (for Dickinson, almost all of her poetry) suffered delayed and disjunctive publication – Dickinson’s in the context of family feuds and Nietzsche’s due to his sister’s ideological interferences.