Untimely Meditations [Paperback]

 

 

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Nietzsche's Untimely Meditations consist of four essays published early in his career, between 1873 and 1876.

The first Meditation is a blistering attack on David Strauss, who represents what Nietzsche despises about his era: a popular theologian following in the footsteps of Schleiermacher and Hegel.

Two of the Meditations discuss individuals who were important early influences on Nietzsche: the composer Richard Wagner and the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer.

And finally the Meditation now widely considered the most original, important, and characteristically Nietzschean, discusses "The Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life".

In "David Strauss, the Confessor and the Writer" Nietzsche criticizes the mindless pursuit of scholarship: "Amazingly, the most obvious question fails to occur to our scholars: what is their work, their hurry, their painful frenzy supposed to be for? To what end Science if it is not to lead to culture? To lead to barbarism, perhaps?"

He mercilessly slices, dices and dismisses the scholar Strauss, comparing his thought to a chronic disease: "He who has once contracted Hegelism and Schleiermacherism is never quite cured of them."

In "Richard Wagner in Bayreuth" Nietzsche describes the trials, tribulations and misunderstandings his friend faced while founding the Bayreuth opera festival in 1872.

In "Schopenhauer as Educator", Nietzsche criticizes "the prevailing haste, from the breathless grasping at every moment, from the precipitation that plucks all things from the bough too soon, from the race and pursuit that nowadays carves furrows in men's faces, and as it were covers all they do with tattoos. As though a potion that prevents them from catching their breath were working within them, they storm ahead with indecent anxiety as the harassed Slaves of the moment, opinion and fashion."

Nietzsche suggests that it is genuine philosophers like Schopenhauer who are able to slow down and overcome this mindless rush, to achieve new levels of thought. He distinguishes between such authentic philosophers and mere scholars: "The learned history of the past has never been the business of a true philosopher, and if a professor of philosophy involves himself in such work he must at best be content to have it said of him: he is a fine classical scholar, antiquary, linguist, historian - but never: he is a philosopher."

Today's mere scholars "have lost all their old arrogance and are as a rule pious, timid and uncertain folk, never brave like Lucretius, or wrathful at human oppression."

Finally, in "The Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life", Nietzsche expresses one of the central themes of his entire corpus: that the conscious, reactive force of history, and knowledge more generally, should be used to affirm the active, unconscious force of Life, rather than to negate it.

And to affirm Life, history must be taken in measured doses. "The oversaturation of an age with history seems to me to be hostile and dangerous to Life... When the historical sense reigns without restraint, it uproots the future because it destroys illusions, and robs the things that exist of the atmosphere in which alone they can live... Only if history can endure to be transformed into a work of Art will it perhaps be able to preserve instincts, or even evoke them."

Nietzsche elaborates on three types of history: Monumental, Antiquarian and Critical.

"That the great moments in the struggle of the human individual constitute a chain, that this chain unites mankind across the millennia like a range of human mountain peaks, that the summit of such a long-ago moment shall be for me still living, bright and great - that is the fundamental idea of the faith in humanity which finds expression in the demand for a Monumental history."

"Supposing someone believed that it would require no more than a hundred men, educated and actively working in a new spirit, to do away with the bogus form of culture which has now become the fashion, how greatly it would strengthen him to realize that the culture of the Renaissance was raised on the shoulders of just such a band of a hundred men" (cf. Frans Johansson's The Medici Effect).

Of Antiquarian history Nietzsche writes that it "belongs to him who preserves and reveres - who looks back to whence he has come, with love and loyalty. By tending with care that which has existed from of old, he wants to preserve for those who shall come into existence after him the conditions under which he himself came into existence - and thus he serves Life."

The danger of Antiquarian history is that "everything old and past that enters one's field of vision is in the end blandly taken to be equally worthy of reverence, while everything that does not approach this antiquity with reverence, that is to say everything New and evolving, is rejected and persecuted... Antiquarian history hinders any firm resolve to attempt something New, thus it paralyzes the man of action who will - and must - offend some piety or other."

"Historical culture is indeed a kind of inborn grey-hairedness, and those who bear its mark from childhood must instinctively believe in the old age of mankind: to age, however, there pertains an appropriate senile occupation, that of looking back, of reckoning up, of closing accounts, of seeking consolation through remembering what has been, in short historical culture."

"But suppose we imagine these Antiquarian latecomers announcing in shrill tones: the race is now at its zenith, for only now does it possess Knowledge of itself. History understood in this Hegelian fashion has been mockingly called God's sojourn on earth... so that for Hegel the climax and terminus of the world-process coincided with his own existence in Berlin."

"Overproud European of the nineteenth century, you are raving! Your Knowledge does not perfect Nature, it only destroys your own nature. Compare for once the heights of your capacity for Knowledge with the depths of your incapacity for action."

"Here it becomes clear how necessary it is to mankind to have, beside the Monumental and Antiquarian modes of regarding the past a third mode, the Critical; and this, too, in the service of Life.

If he is to live, man must possess and from time to time employ the strength to break up and dissolve a part of the past... It is not justice which here sits in judgement; it is even less mercy which pronounces the verdict: it is Life alone, that dark, driving power that insatiably thirsts for itself. Its sentence is always unmerciful... the past is regarded critically, then one takes the knife to its roots, then one cruelly tramples over every kind of piety... Men and ages which serve Life by judging and destroying a past are always dangerous and endangered men and ages."

"These are the services history is capable of performing for Life; every man and every nation requires, in accordance with its goals, energies and needs, a certain kind of knowledge of the past, now in the form of Monumental, now of Antiquarian, now of Critical history... but always and only for the ends of Life."

"Is Life to dominate Knowledge and Science, or is Knowledge to dominate Life? Which of these two forces is the higher and more decisive? There can be no doubt: Life is the higher, the dominating force, for Knowledge which annihilated Life would have annihilated itself with it."

Herein lie the seeds of Nieztsche's notion of Eternal Recurrence, which will germinate in The Gay Science, and bear fruit in Zarathustra.

Neitzsche's treatment of the four "types" of history in "On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life" is facsinating, both in its own right, and as a prelude to the notion of eternal recurrence.

This is really a book that must be read by anyone serioulsly interested in Nietzsche's philosophy.

It's an early book of Nietzsche's, and imo should be qualified as juvenilia. He wrote "Meditations" before he developed his concise aphoristic style he's famous for -- this books is written in the essay form and, with all due respect, he was not good at that. To be sure, now and then you'll hit a pearl, but to undig it from below the layers of totally overwrought, metaphorically overloaded, plodding and grandiloquent logorrhea is not an easy task. Half-a-page, highly elliptic phrases predominate: by the time you're through a page you forget what the hell it was all about. That's about style, but if you persevere and distill the subject matter and argumentation, they will be unconvincing as well, and furthermore, unnecessary. Especially bad is the essay on Schopenhauer, it rambles on without end while going nowhere... Overall, "Mediations" makes an impression of an immature, adolescent work; I suspect it can be of interest to scholars, but a casual reader is unlikely to enjoy it.

My suggestion: Nietzsche should be read from "The Gay Science" and up. Everything before is optional (charitably speaking.)

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