The Untimely Ones1
1
The four Untimely Ones are certainly warlike. They prove that I was no Jack the Dreamer, that I take pleasure in fencing—perhaps also that I am dangerously quick at the draw. The first attack (1873) was directed against German “culture”2 on which I looked down even then with ruthless contempt. Without meaning, without substance, without aim: mere “public opinion.” There is no more malignant misunderstanding than to believe that the great military success3 of the Germans proved anything in favor of this “culture”—or, of all things, its triumph over France.
The second Untimely One (1874) brings to light what is dangerous and gnaws at and poisons life in our kind of traffic with science and scholarship4—how life is made sick by this dehumanized and mechanical grinding of gears, the “impersonality” of the laborer, the false economy of the “division of labor.” The aim is lost, genuine culture—and the means, the modern traffic with science, barbarized. In this essay the “historical sense” of which this century is proud was recognized for the first time as a disease, as a typical symptom of decay.
In the third and fourth Untimely Ones, two images of the hardest self-love, self-discipline5 are put up against all this, as pointers to a higher concept of culture, to restore the concept of culture—untimely types par excellence, full of sovereign contempt for everything around them that was called “Empire,” “culture,”6“Christianity,” “Bismarck,” “success”—Schopenhauer and Wagner or, in one word, Nietzsche.
2
Of these four attempts at assassination the first had an extraordinary success. The noise it evoked was in every sense splendid. I had touched the sore spot of a victorious nation—that its victory was not a cultural event but perhaps, perhaps something altogether different.
The response came from all sides and by no means only from the old friends of David Strauss whom I had made ridiculous as a type of the German “cultural” philistine and satisfait,1 in short as the author of his beer-hall gospel of The Old and the New Faith (the word Bildungsphilister has survived in the German language from my essay).2 These old friends, Württembergers and Swabians whom I had wounded deeply when I found their prodigy, Strauss, funny, replied in such a foursquare and rude manner that I could not have asked for more; the replies from Prussia were more prudent—they had more Prussian, Berlin blue in them. It was a newspaper in Leipzig, the notorious Grenzboten, that became most indecent; I found it difficult to restrain the indignant Baselers from taking action. The only ones who decided unconditionally in my favor were a few old gentlemen, from mixed and in part undiscoverable motives. Ewald in G?ttingen was among them;3 he suggested my attempt had been fatal for Strauss. Also the old Hegelian, Bruno Bauer,4 who was henceforth one of my most attentive readers. During his last years he liked to refer to me; for example, by giving Herr von Treitschke, the Prussian historiographer, a hint whom he might ask for some information about the concept of culture which had escaped him. Nothing written about this essay and its author was more thought-provoking or longer than what an old disciple of the philosopher von Baader5 said, a Professor Hoffmann in Würzburg.6 On the basis of this essay he predicted a great destiny for me—bringing about a kind of crisis and ultimate decision in the problem of atheism whose most instinctive and relentless type he divined in me. It was atheism that led me to Schopenhauer.
Nothing was heard as well or experienced as bitterly as an extraordinarily strong and courageous plea by the usually mild Karl Hillebrand, this last humane German who knew how to write. His piece was read in the Augsburger Zeitung; today it can be read, in a somewhat more cautious form, in his collected essays.7 Here the essay was considered as an event, a turning point, a first self-examination, the very best sign, as a real return of German seriousness and German passion in matters of the spirit. Hillebrand was full of high praise for the form of the essay, for its mature taste, for its perfect tact in distinguishing between the person and the issue: he designated it as the best polemical essay written in German—in the art of polemics which is so dangerous and inadvisable for Germans. Saying Yes unconditionally, even sharpening the points I had dared to make against the galloping slovenliness of the German language8 (today they play the purists and can no longer form a sentence), with equal contempt for the “foremost writers” of this nation, he concluded with an expression of his admiration for my courage—that “supreme courage which prefers charges precisely against the favorites of a people.”
The aftereffects of this essay upon my life are virtually inestimable. Nobody so far has picked quarrels with me; in Germany I am treated with gloomy caution: for years I have made use of an unconditional freedom of speech for which nobody today, least of all in the Reich, has sufficient liberty. My paradise lies “in the shadow of my sword.”
At bottom, I had put into practise one of Stendhal’s maxims: he advises men to make their entry into society with a duel. And how I had picked my opponent! the foremost German free spirit!
Indeed, an altogether new type of free spirit thus gained his first expression: to this day nothing is more foreign and less related to me than the whole European and American species of libres penseurs9 I am much more profoundly at odds with them, as incorrigible blockheads and buffoons of “modern ideas,” than with any of their opponents. They also want in their own way to “improve” mankind, in their own image; against what I am, what I want, they would wage an irreconcilable war if they understood me: all of them still believe in the “ideal.”—I am the first immoralist.
3
That the two Untimely Ones distinguished by the names of Schopenhauer and Wagner contribute much to the understanding of, or even to the formulation of the proper psychological questions about, these two cases, I should not wish to assert—excepting, as seems fair, some details. Thus, for example, the elementary fact in Wagner’s character is already designated with a profound sureness of instinct as an actor’s talent that merely explicates itself in his means and intentions.
What I was fundamentally trying to do in these essays was something altogether different from psychology: an unequaled problem of education, a new concept of self-discipline, self-defense to the point of hardness, a way to greatness and world-historical tasks was seeking its first expression. Broadly speaking, I caught hold of two famous and as yet altogether undiagnosed types, as one catches hold of an opportunity, in order to say something, in order to have at hand a few more formulas, signs, means of language. This is really suggested with a perfectly uncanny sagacity near the end of section 7 in the third Untimely One. Plato employed Socrates in this fashion, as a [sign language for Plato].1
Now that I am looking back from a certain distance upon the conditions of which these essays bear witness, I do not wish to deny that at bottom they speak only of me. The essay Wagner in Bayreuth is a vision of my future, while in Schopenhauer as Educator my innermost history, my becoming, is inscribed. Above all, my promise!
What I am today, where I am today—at a height where I speak no longer with words but with lightning bolts—ah, how remote from this I still was at that time!—But I beheld the land—I did not deceive myself for a moment about the way, the sea, the danger—and success. The great calm in promising, this happy gaze into a future that is not to remain a mere promise!
Here every word is experienced, is deep, is inward; what is most painful is not lacking: there are words in it that are virtually bloodthirsty. But a wind of the great freedom blows over everything; even wounds do not have the effect of objections.
How I understand the philosopher—as a terrible explosive, endangering everything—how my concept of the philosopher is worlds removed from any concept that would include even a Kant, not to speak of academic “ruminants” and other professors of philosophy—this essay gives inestimable information about that, although at bottom it is admittedly not “Schopenhauer as Educator” that speaks here, but his opposite, “Nietzsche as Educator.”
Considering that in those days I practiced the scholar’s craft, and perhaps knew something about this craft, the harsh psychology of the scholar that suddenly emerges in this essay is of some significance: it expresses the feeling of distance,2 the profound assurance about what could be my task and what could only be means, entr’acte, and minor works. It shows my prudence that I was many things and in many places in order to be able to become one thing—to be able to attain one thing. I had to be a scholar, too, for some time.3
1Die Unzeitgem?ssen: the four essays in question were published as Unzeitgem?sse Betrachtungen (untimely meditations), one by one, with separate titles: David Strauss, The Confessor and Writer; On the Use and Disadvantage of History for Life; Schopenhauer as Educator; and Richard Wagner in Bayreuth.
2Bildung has no exact equivalent in English: Bild means picture or image; bilden, to shape or form, but also to educate; ungebildet, uneducated, uncultured. In this section, Bildung has been rendered by “culture” (in quotes), Kultur by culture (without quotes).
3In the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71.
4Science and scholarship: Wissenschaft. After this, science has been used to render Wissenschaft, but it should be kept in mind that the reference is not primarily to the natural sciences. Cf. Beyond Good and Evil, Part Six (“We Scholars,” sections 204-13): the concept of the laborer is used similarly in section 211. See also Genealogy, III, sections 23ff.
5Selbstsucht, Selbstzucht. On the former, see the chapter “On the Three Evils” in Zarathustra HI (Portable Nietzsche., especially 302): the word used there is also Selbstsucht. Cf. also Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, 1169a: “the good man ought to be a lover of self since he will then act nobly, and so both benefit himself and aid his fellows; but the bad man ought not to be a lover of self, since he will follow his base passions, and so injure both himself and his neighbours” (trans. Rackham, Loeb Classical Library).
6“Reich,” “Bildung” …
1Smug.
2The word had actually been used earlier by Gustav Teichmüller (1832–1888), a professor at Basel from 1868 to 1871; but Nietzsche’s claim (ist von meiner Schrift her in der Sprache übriggeblieben) is literally true. For all that, he would hardly have said this if he had remembered that the coinage was Teichmüller’s.
3Heinrich Ewald (1803–1875), a very eminent Old Testament scholar and orientalist, was one of the celebrated “G?ttingen Seven” who in 1837 were expelled from the university because they had signed a liberal manifesto; he went to Tübingen, but returned to G?ttingen in 1848—and was pensioned off in 1867 because he refused to swear an oath of allegiance to the king of Prussia.
4Bruno Bauer (1809–82) started out as a right-wing, conservative Hegelian and became a professor of theology at Bonn in 1839. In 1840 and 1841 he published two volumes of New Testament criticism, and in 1842 he was deprived of the right to teach. Now he was accounted a “Young” or left-wing Hegelian, and he has been called “the most radical of the New Testament critics of his age.” He attacked David Friedrich Strauss’s ideas about the origins of Christianity and emphasized Hellenistic influences. Albert Schweitzer praised him highly in his Geschichte der Leben Jesu Forschung (Tübingen 1921, p. 161; The Quest of the Historical Jesus) for having assembled the most brilliant and complete summary of the difficulties presented by the life of Jesus. Marx’s and Engels’ attacks on Bauer, as “St. Bruno,” written in 1845/46, are included in Die Deutsche Ideologie (published posthumously in 1932; The German Ideology). Bauer’s ideas are also discussed by Karl L?with in Von Hegel bis Nietzsche (Europa Verlag, Zurich and New York 1941; From Hegel to Nietzsche, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York 1964).
5Franz Xaver von Baader (1765–1841), who became a professor at Munich in 1826, influenced Schelling and other romantics.
6Franz Hoffmann, Philosophische Schriften, vol. V (Erlangen, 1878), pp. 410-47. See also J. Haefner, Leben und Schaffen des Würzburger Philosophen F. K. Hoffmann (The life and work of the Würzburg philosopher F. K. Hoffmann; dissertation, 1941, 112 pp.).
7Karl Hillebrand, “Einiges über den Verfall der deutschen Sprache und der deutschen Gesinnung” (some thoughts about the decay of the German language and the German mind) in Zeiten, Volker und Menschen (periods, peoples, and persons), vol. II (Berlin, 1875; 2nd ed., Strassburg, 1892), pp. 291-310. Hillebrand also reviewed Nietzsche’s second and third “untimely meditations”: “über Wissen und historischen Sinn” (on knowledge and the historical sense) and “Schopenhauer und das deutsche Publikum” (Schopenhauer and the German public), ibid., pp. 311-38 and 353-66.
8Sprach-Verlumpung in Deutschland.
9Cf. Beyond Good and Evil, Part Two, “The Free Spirit,” especially section
1The words placed in brackets are not in Nietzsche’s hand and were added by a German editor—presumably Gast. What Nietzsche claims may sound farfetched, but actually the first section of Schopenhauer as Educator makes this point very plainly. The question is raised how we can realize our true self, and the prescription is that we should ask ourselves: “What have you really loved till now?” For “your true self does not lie deeply concealed within you but immeasurably high above you, or at least above what you usually take for your ego. Your real educators, those/who formed you, reveal to you what is the true primary meaning and fundamental substance of your being …” The meditation on Schopenhauer is thus introduced as Nietzsche’s attempt to discover his own true self; and Nietzsche’s praise not only of Schopenhauer’s honesty but also—of all things—of his “cheerfulness” (in section 2) points in the same direction.
2Cf. the pathos of distance in section 257 of Beyond Good and Evil.
3Cf. ibid., section 211: “It may be necessary for the education of a genuine philosopher that he himself has also once stood on all these steps on which his servants, the scientific laborers of philosophy, remain standing …”