Nietzsche: Untimely Meditations
(Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy edition, one volume, translated by R. J. Hollingdale)
This is the final completed work of Nietzsche I have to cover, not counting minor unpublished essays and the Dionysian Dithyrambs. In other words, this is it.
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In 1874 Nietzsche was not yet Nietzsche as we know him. He had yet to write any aphorism. He did not announce that God is dead, that good and evil are tools used to the weak to overpower the strong, or that Europe was becoming Buddhist. He was still a philologist and classicist at Basel, and he was still friends with Richard Wagner. However, he was also not quite the promising little worker he had been looking to be in the past. His first book, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, did not do so well. His job as a philologist and lecturer was starting to show visible wear on him. Soon his relationship with Wager would become strained. Nietzsche was in a real transition, one that would follow through until 1880, when he would emerge with Daybreak and define himself as a philosopher.
However, it is something of a lie to say that the Nietzsche of the 1870s is not the Nietzsche that we know. In the latter half of the decade, of course, he produced Human, All Too Human and its supplements, in which he established something of a position and style from which to pursue a particularly Nietzschean philosophy (though he did not quite find his vocabulary or specific topics by that point). But even before then, from 1874 to 1876, an image of Nietzsche can be found, one that is, in a way, clearer than any later mission statement on the part of Nietzsche (this later difficulty is, of course, completely intentional on Nietzsche’s part). This period was the time of the Untimely Meditations, four essays of what was to be a set of thirteen or so in total, though the rest were never completed. In many ways these essays show the younger, not-quite-Nietzschean Nietzsche, due both to their outward declarations and assumptions (the praise of Schopenhauer and Wagner, for example) and more subtle distinctions not yet made (terms such as ‘good’ and ‘evil,’ ‘love’ and ‘justice,’ for instance, are used in a sense that the modern pop-culture reader would easily recognize). But, at the same time, there is something fundamentally Nietzschean in the Meditations; it is apparent to someone that has experience with Nietzsche’s works that no one would write them but him. Further, with relatively little work a consistent thought and thesis runs through them, one that Nietzsche himself later holds to be essential to understanding him; the understanding of culture, what it is, what gives rise to it, and especially what weakens it. It is here that one can find a clearly set out thesis on the state of society and what it should be, one that is, I think, very useful in introducing the ideas and especially the mission of Nietzsche throughout his later writings. Even though the individual essays all have varying ostensible subjects (David Strauss, history, Schopenhauer, and Wagner, respectively), there is a clear message that is being said throughout, and it is a familiar one.
What makes these essays so important in Nietzschean thought, I think, is how straightforward and conventional they are at times in stating what Nietzsche is after. Observe, for example, the word “culture,” a word that no doubt has a lot of significance. Nietzsche does not introduce the concept by turning it into an elaborate metaphor, or deride it as being the will of some fool, or anything of the sort. In fact, he simply defines it at the beginning of the first essay: “Culture is, above all, unity of artistic style in all the expressions of the life of a people.” (David Strauss, the Writer and Confessor, UM 5) Shockingly straightforward! Culture, then, is a single message. It is what determines a society, its goals, its purpose. Culture, in effect, is the society; without a culture, society would just be a mass of people. I suppose I can just stop now.
Well, no, not really. Nietzsche will add to this definition as time goes on. I think we can forgive him on this point, though; he did write these essays over a three year period, after all. “Culture is liberation, the removal of all the weeds, rubble and vermin that want to attack tender buds of the plant, an outstreaming of light and warmth . . .” and so on. (Schopenhauer as Educator, UM 130) That sounds decidedly more like the Nietzsche we’re all familiar with.
These two definitions of culture are not in any sense contradictory, nor are they part of different definitions, or so I believe. They do, however, come from two different contexts which should be explained further. The first definition, which defines culture as unity of style, comes from the first essay. The essay’s title suggests that the essay is about David Strauss. It is, from time to time, but there’s a much more significant thesis behind it. It is that of the cultural philistine, a term which Nietzsche thought he invented (he did not, though he did come up with it on his own) and which people often think they know the definition of. “Philistine” in its own is basically a derogatory term meaning grubby materialist, one who lacks culture. A cultural philistine, then, is one who treats culture itself with an incredible lack of culture. “[H]e fancies that he is himself a son of the muses and man of culture.” (David Strauss, UM 7). The cultural philistine collects; books, paintings, statues, all the marks of a dignified life, and yet he doesn’t understand a thing about them. The philistine knows nothing about the kind of culture that actually creates such things, and instead thinks that the possession of a famous work by a national is sufficient to prove that one is “cultured.” “‘We have our culture, do we not?’ they say, ‘for we have our classics, do we not? Not only have the foundations been laid, but the building itself stands already upon them – we ourselves are this building.’ And the philistine raises his hand to his own brow.” (David Strauss, UM 9)
One can see that implicit in the belief of the philistine is a certain self-confidence that the one who possesses cultural things is the one who possesses culture itself. The logical consequence of this is the belief that, surely, the current age is the most cultured. It is the latest, after all: look how it developed, how it was built upon the backs of mighty empires! Greece and Rome were great, but they were then; we have their culture and our own besides! The second essay, On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life, asks just what this view of history means. Hegel said that history itself was the progression of Geist as it comes to know itself; thus, the current age must certainly be an improvement upon the latter. While Hegel’s view isn’t necessarily the lens through which people view history (though it was admittedly more popular then, a generation after Hegel’s life), this view is not uncommon. History is inevitable progress, the progress of culture. Think of America. Is it not the conclusion, the goal of the history of Europe? Are we not the free state that the world sought for so long? Well, not necessarily. History is often used as a justification of the present, especially when seen in a Hegelian sense. Thus men read the documents of the past and look at them and say, “Thus it was, be glad it is no longer.” History is science in this sense; it is the study of the linear progression of events leading up to the current moment. The confidence in the present combines with an “impartial” view of the past to create history as science.
Is there something wrong with history as science? It certainly seems to be a goal these days, to have a real impartial view of the world. Yes, there is problem, or so says Nietzsche. Remember how I said that the essays were tied by culture? They still are. The second essay is on the uses and advantages of history for life, and, according to Nietzsche, history as science has none:
For Nietzsche, the real use of history is divided into three modes: monumental, antiquarian, and critical. Monumental history is the history that inspires, the history of great men and great deeds. The monumental history of Caesar is not the history of the man that crossed the Rubicon in 49 B.C.; that is merely a fact. Monumental history is what the crossing of the Rubicon represented. The man who views history thus “learns from it that the greatness that once existed was in any event once possible and may thus be possible again; he goes his way with a more cheerful step, for the doubt which assailed him in weaker moments, whether he was not perhaps desiring the impossible, has been banished.” (History, UM 69). The antiquarian view is not condescension towards the past, but looking back with reverence. The antiquarian “looks back to whence he has come, to where he came into being, with love and loyalty; with this piety he as it were gives thanks for his existence.” (History, UM 72). Looking to his past gives him the love necessary to fight for the future, for the hope of what has come. Lastly, the critical view makes sure that reverence is given only where it is due. Life is not happiness and good will towards men, and so neither is history; the past must be overcome, not merely revered. “The best we can do is to confront our inherited and hereditary nature with our knowledge, and through a new, stern discipline combat our inborn heritage and implant in ourselves a new habit, a new instinct, a second nature, so that our first nature withers away.” (History, UM 76)
What is the end of the three methods of historicizing? Of what use is history for life, ultimately?
The historian is a person with a purpose. The historian must bring together the forces of history with the state of the present in order to bring about better life. In a manner of speaking, the goal of history is that of culture; the perversion of history into mere people and events is the destruction of the meaning of history in the life of a people; they are filled with events and opinions with no thread to connect them. Unity it destroyed by history as science, and the one who seeks to repair this unity must “venture to reflect how the health of a people undermined by the study of a history may be again restored, how it may rediscover its instincts and therewith its honesty.” (History, UM 80)
History, then, is a study with an end, that of culture. But the view of history as raising men to “become mature and accustomed to the heroic” has not completed the connection with “unity of style in all the expressions of the life of a people.” This connection is completed in the third essay, Schopenhauer as Educator. Again, the essay is ostensibly about Schopenhauer, but there is a substantial undercurrent that underlies its arguments and, ultimately its view of Schopenhauer. The true emphasis is on culture through the perspective of education, “[a]nd so today I shall remember one of the teachers and taskmasters of whom I can boast, Arthur Schopenhauer – and later on I shall recall others.” Interestingly enough, there is virtually no visible discussion of Schopenhauer’s discussion. What is discussed is education, in a twofold sense: the education of Schopenhauer himself, how he became the man he did, and Schopenhauer as educator, the educator of Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s concern is the proper development of the educator; Schopenhauer himself is merely an example.
What concern are educators to Nietzsche? Educators are everything. Here we hit upon a vein that has run alongside the unified view of culture present throughout these essays. It was seen a bit when the cultural philistine was described, and a sort of unmentioned assumption was present in the scientific view of history, but here we must drag it up from the depths so that we might see it for what it is. It is the scholar. The cultural philistine “lays the final arbitration as to all questions of taste and culture in the hands of the scholar and regards itself as an ever-growing compendium of learned opinions on art, literature, and philosophy; it is concerned to constrain the scholar to express his opinions and then to administer them to the German people admixed, diluted or systematized, as a medicinal draught.” (David Strauss, UM 37-38) Within philistine culture, where things of value are collected as valuables and in the process lose their value, scholars are the ones who designate value to cultural objects. Scholars certify the importance of the current society, the progress it has made, the works it possesses, and the overall quality of its people, allowing cultural philistines to rest comfortable in their achievement. In this manner the scholar must, of course, have control over history as well:
This use of history and of education has a goal: “not of whole, mature, and harmonious personalities, but of labour of the greatest possible common utility.” The scholar is the diligent worker, the perfect Utilitarian. Utilitarianism is, of course, a practical ethics of utility; what is useful is what is good. But what is good? Pleasure? Contentment? “Man does not strive for pleasure; only the Englishman does.” (Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, “Maxims and Arrows” Aphorism 12) Education should have, must have a higher goal than pleasure or contentment. The scholar does not realize that, because the scholar is a reader of parchments and manuscripts, a collector of tidbits, and, as seen above, a comforter and protector of the status quo. For this reason the scholar is actually a danger to any sort of originality in man: “he harbours a certain natural hatred for the fruitful man; which is why geniuses and scholars have at all times been at odds with one another. For the latter want to kill, dissect and understand nature, while the former want to augment nature with new living nature; and so there exists a conflict of activities and intentions.” (Schopenhauer as Educator, UM 174)
With the genius we have finally arrived at the crux of the matter and the full meaning and purpose of culture as such. In Schopenhauer as Educator Nietzsche defines culture as “liberation, the removal of all the weeds, rubble and vermin that want to attack tender buds of the plant . . . .” The goal of the study of history should be “to become mature and to flee from that paralyzing upbringing of the present age . . . .” And from Schopenhauer, from both the man and the philosophy, one must “gain insight into his own want and misery, into his own limitedness, so as then to learn the nature of his antidotes and consolations: namely, sacrifice of the ego, submission to the noblest ends, above all to those of justice and compassion.” (Schopenhauer as Educator, UM 142) “This is the root of all true culture; and if I understand by this the longing of man to be reborn as saint and genius, I know that one does not have to be a Buddhist to understand this myth.” (Schopenhauer as Educator, UM 142) It is the genius which is the end and meaning of culture, the cultivation of the great individual: “[O]ne may hear whether genius, the highest fruit of life, can perhaps justify life as such . . . .” (Schopenhauer as Educator, UM 146) Let’s make it even less subtle: “‘Mankind must work continually at the production of individual great men – that and nothing else is its task.’” (Schopenhauer as Educator, UM 161). This man I know, and he is Friedrich Nietzsche.
In closing, it should be noted that I have taken no quotations from, and in fact made no reference to, the fourth essay, Richard Wagner in Bayreuth. Partly this is because there is relatively little on culture itself compared to the other three (though it is far from empty), and it offers less in terms of new content (though again, new content is not lacking). In fact, it can perhaps be said that the first three essays themselves form the thesis and argument of the Meditations, and the fourth is kind of an odd one; Nietzsche is there, alright, but in this case the essay is primarily about Wagner, and the way he goes about it is rather unusual for him, especially considering the difficulty his relationship with Wagner was in at the time. Thus in the namely of scholarliness I reject the fourth Meditation because it does not agree with my thesis, that the essays form a coherent whole, at least in the background and developing message. Though that's not quite true, because as I said, Nietzsche is there, and he has a message; it’s just that, in this case, the message is subsumed by Nietzsche’s need to put forth one last hope in his relationship with Wagner. It wouldn’t last; Wagner publicly attacked Human, All Too Human, and after that Nietzsche had his own path to follow.
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That's Nietzsche. I imagine that in the future I will return to him with greater depth, but for now I'll leave him be. For the next couple days I will be spitting out Statements of Purpose like there's no tomorrow, as well as formalizing documentation and such, so that the better part of graduate school applications are behind me. Then I return to Heidegger, the later Heidegger to be specific. First is Discourse on Thinking. It's about fifty pages, so I can get something up in a relatively short time. Until then.
This is the final completed work of Nietzsche I have to cover, not counting minor unpublished essays and the Dionysian Dithyrambs. In other words, this is it.
-----
In 1874 Nietzsche was not yet Nietzsche as we know him. He had yet to write any aphorism. He did not announce that God is dead, that good and evil are tools used to the weak to overpower the strong, or that Europe was becoming Buddhist. He was still a philologist and classicist at Basel, and he was still friends with Richard Wagner. However, he was also not quite the promising little worker he had been looking to be in the past. His first book, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, did not do so well. His job as a philologist and lecturer was starting to show visible wear on him. Soon his relationship with Wager would become strained. Nietzsche was in a real transition, one that would follow through until 1880, when he would emerge with Daybreak and define himself as a philosopher.
However, it is something of a lie to say that the Nietzsche of the 1870s is not the Nietzsche that we know. In the latter half of the decade, of course, he produced Human, All Too Human and its supplements, in which he established something of a position and style from which to pursue a particularly Nietzschean philosophy (though he did not quite find his vocabulary or specific topics by that point). But even before then, from 1874 to 1876, an image of Nietzsche can be found, one that is, in a way, clearer than any later mission statement on the part of Nietzsche (this later difficulty is, of course, completely intentional on Nietzsche’s part). This period was the time of the Untimely Meditations, four essays of what was to be a set of thirteen or so in total, though the rest were never completed. In many ways these essays show the younger, not-quite-Nietzschean Nietzsche, due both to their outward declarations and assumptions (the praise of Schopenhauer and Wagner, for example) and more subtle distinctions not yet made (terms such as ‘good’ and ‘evil,’ ‘love’ and ‘justice,’ for instance, are used in a sense that the modern pop-culture reader would easily recognize). But, at the same time, there is something fundamentally Nietzschean in the Meditations; it is apparent to someone that has experience with Nietzsche’s works that no one would write them but him. Further, with relatively little work a consistent thought and thesis runs through them, one that Nietzsche himself later holds to be essential to understanding him; the understanding of culture, what it is, what gives rise to it, and especially what weakens it. It is here that one can find a clearly set out thesis on the state of society and what it should be, one that is, I think, very useful in introducing the ideas and especially the mission of Nietzsche throughout his later writings. Even though the individual essays all have varying ostensible subjects (David Strauss, history, Schopenhauer, and Wagner, respectively), there is a clear message that is being said throughout, and it is a familiar one.
What makes these essays so important in Nietzschean thought, I think, is how straightforward and conventional they are at times in stating what Nietzsche is after. Observe, for example, the word “culture,” a word that no doubt has a lot of significance. Nietzsche does not introduce the concept by turning it into an elaborate metaphor, or deride it as being the will of some fool, or anything of the sort. In fact, he simply defines it at the beginning of the first essay: “Culture is, above all, unity of artistic style in all the expressions of the life of a people.” (David Strauss, the Writer and Confessor, UM 5) Shockingly straightforward! Culture, then, is a single message. It is what determines a society, its goals, its purpose. Culture, in effect, is the society; without a culture, society would just be a mass of people. I suppose I can just stop now.
Well, no, not really. Nietzsche will add to this definition as time goes on. I think we can forgive him on this point, though; he did write these essays over a three year period, after all. “Culture is liberation, the removal of all the weeds, rubble and vermin that want to attack tender buds of the plant, an outstreaming of light and warmth . . .” and so on. (Schopenhauer as Educator, UM 130) That sounds decidedly more like the Nietzsche we’re all familiar with.
These two definitions of culture are not in any sense contradictory, nor are they part of different definitions, or so I believe. They do, however, come from two different contexts which should be explained further. The first definition, which defines culture as unity of style, comes from the first essay. The essay’s title suggests that the essay is about David Strauss. It is, from time to time, but there’s a much more significant thesis behind it. It is that of the cultural philistine, a term which Nietzsche thought he invented (he did not, though he did come up with it on his own) and which people often think they know the definition of. “Philistine” in its own is basically a derogatory term meaning grubby materialist, one who lacks culture. A cultural philistine, then, is one who treats culture itself with an incredible lack of culture. “[H]e fancies that he is himself a son of the muses and man of culture.” (David Strauss, UM 7). The cultural philistine collects; books, paintings, statues, all the marks of a dignified life, and yet he doesn’t understand a thing about them. The philistine knows nothing about the kind of culture that actually creates such things, and instead thinks that the possession of a famous work by a national is sufficient to prove that one is “cultured.” “‘We have our culture, do we not?’ they say, ‘for we have our classics, do we not? Not only have the foundations been laid, but the building itself stands already upon them – we ourselves are this building.’ And the philistine raises his hand to his own brow.” (David Strauss, UM 9)
One can see that implicit in the belief of the philistine is a certain self-confidence that the one who possesses cultural things is the one who possesses culture itself. The logical consequence of this is the belief that, surely, the current age is the most cultured. It is the latest, after all: look how it developed, how it was built upon the backs of mighty empires! Greece and Rome were great, but they were then; we have their culture and our own besides! The second essay, On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life, asks just what this view of history means. Hegel said that history itself was the progression of Geist as it comes to know itself; thus, the current age must certainly be an improvement upon the latter. While Hegel’s view isn’t necessarily the lens through which people view history (though it was admittedly more popular then, a generation after Hegel’s life), this view is not uncommon. History is inevitable progress, the progress of culture. Think of America. Is it not the conclusion, the goal of the history of Europe? Are we not the free state that the world sought for so long? Well, not necessarily. History is often used as a justification of the present, especially when seen in a Hegelian sense. Thus men read the documents of the past and look at them and say, “Thus it was, be glad it is no longer.” History is science in this sense; it is the study of the linear progression of events leading up to the current moment. The confidence in the present combines with an “impartial” view of the past to create history as science.
Is there something wrong with history as science? It certainly seems to be a goal these days, to have a real impartial view of the world. Yes, there is problem, or so says Nietzsche. Remember how I said that the essays were tied by culture? They still are. The second essay is on the uses and advantages of history for life, and, according to Nietzsche, history as science has none:
History become pure, sovereign science would be for mankind a sort of conclusion of life and a settling of accounts with it. The study of history is something salutary and fruitful for the future only as an attendant of a mighty new current of life, of an evolving culture for example, that is to say only when it is dominated and directed by a higher force and does not itself dominate and direct. (On the Uses and Advantages of History, UM 67)
For Nietzsche, the real use of history is divided into three modes: monumental, antiquarian, and critical. Monumental history is the history that inspires, the history of great men and great deeds. The monumental history of Caesar is not the history of the man that crossed the Rubicon in 49 B.C.; that is merely a fact. Monumental history is what the crossing of the Rubicon represented. The man who views history thus “learns from it that the greatness that once existed was in any event once possible and may thus be possible again; he goes his way with a more cheerful step, for the doubt which assailed him in weaker moments, whether he was not perhaps desiring the impossible, has been banished.” (History, UM 69). The antiquarian view is not condescension towards the past, but looking back with reverence. The antiquarian “looks back to whence he has come, to where he came into being, with love and loyalty; with this piety he as it were gives thanks for his existence.” (History, UM 72). Looking to his past gives him the love necessary to fight for the future, for the hope of what has come. Lastly, the critical view makes sure that reverence is given only where it is due. Life is not happiness and good will towards men, and so neither is history; the past must be overcome, not merely revered. “The best we can do is to confront our inherited and hereditary nature with our knowledge, and through a new, stern discipline combat our inborn heritage and implant in ourselves a new habit, a new instinct, a second nature, so that our first nature withers away.” (History, UM 76)
What is the end of the three methods of historicizing? Of what use is history for life, ultimately?
If . . . you acquire a living knowledge of history of great men, you will learn from it a supreme commandment: to become mature and to flee from that paralyzing upbringing of the present age which sees its advantage in preventing your growth so as to rule over you to the full while you are still immature . . . . With a hundred such men – raised in this umodern way, that is to say become mature and accustomed to the heroic – the whole noisy sham-culture of our age could now be silenced forever. (History, UM 94-95)
The historian is a person with a purpose. The historian must bring together the forces of history with the state of the present in order to bring about better life. In a manner of speaking, the goal of history is that of culture; the perversion of history into mere people and events is the destruction of the meaning of history in the life of a people; they are filled with events and opinions with no thread to connect them. Unity it destroyed by history as science, and the one who seeks to repair this unity must “venture to reflect how the health of a people undermined by the study of a history may be again restored, how it may rediscover its instincts and therewith its honesty.” (History, UM 80)
History, then, is a study with an end, that of culture. But the view of history as raising men to “become mature and accustomed to the heroic” has not completed the connection with “unity of style in all the expressions of the life of a people.” This connection is completed in the third essay, Schopenhauer as Educator. Again, the essay is ostensibly about Schopenhauer, but there is a substantial undercurrent that underlies its arguments and, ultimately its view of Schopenhauer. The true emphasis is on culture through the perspective of education, “[a]nd so today I shall remember one of the teachers and taskmasters of whom I can boast, Arthur Schopenhauer – and later on I shall recall others.” Interestingly enough, there is virtually no visible discussion of Schopenhauer’s discussion. What is discussed is education, in a twofold sense: the education of Schopenhauer himself, how he became the man he did, and Schopenhauer as educator, the educator of Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s concern is the proper development of the educator; Schopenhauer himself is merely an example.
What concern are educators to Nietzsche? Educators are everything. Here we hit upon a vein that has run alongside the unified view of culture present throughout these essays. It was seen a bit when the cultural philistine was described, and a sort of unmentioned assumption was present in the scientific view of history, but here we must drag it up from the depths so that we might see it for what it is. It is the scholar. The cultural philistine “lays the final arbitration as to all questions of taste and culture in the hands of the scholar and regards itself as an ever-growing compendium of learned opinions on art, literature, and philosophy; it is concerned to constrain the scholar to express his opinions and then to administer them to the German people admixed, diluted or systematized, as a medicinal draught.” (David Strauss, UM 37-38) Within philistine culture, where things of value are collected as valuables and in the process lose their value, scholars are the ones who designate value to cultural objects. Scholars certify the importance of the current society, the progress it has made, the works it possesses, and the overall quality of its people, allowing cultural philistines to rest comfortable in their achievement. In this manner the scholar must, of course, have control over history as well:
The education of German youth . . . proceeds from precisely this false and unfruitful conception of culture: its goal, viewed in its essence, is not at all the free cultivated man but the scholar, the man of science, who stands aside from life so as to know it unobstructedly; its result, observed empirically, is the historical-aesthetic cultural philistine, the precocious and up-to-the-minute babbler about state, church and art, the man who appreciates everything, the insatiable stomach which nonetheless does not know what honest hunger and thirst are. (History, UM 117).
This use of history and of education has a goal: “not of whole, mature, and harmonious personalities, but of labour of the greatest possible common utility.” The scholar is the diligent worker, the perfect Utilitarian. Utilitarianism is, of course, a practical ethics of utility; what is useful is what is good. But what is good? Pleasure? Contentment? “Man does not strive for pleasure; only the Englishman does.” (Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, “Maxims and Arrows” Aphorism 12) Education should have, must have a higher goal than pleasure or contentment. The scholar does not realize that, because the scholar is a reader of parchments and manuscripts, a collector of tidbits, and, as seen above, a comforter and protector of the status quo. For this reason the scholar is actually a danger to any sort of originality in man: “he harbours a certain natural hatred for the fruitful man; which is why geniuses and scholars have at all times been at odds with one another. For the latter want to kill, dissect and understand nature, while the former want to augment nature with new living nature; and so there exists a conflict of activities and intentions.” (Schopenhauer as Educator, UM 174)
With the genius we have finally arrived at the crux of the matter and the full meaning and purpose of culture as such. In Schopenhauer as Educator Nietzsche defines culture as “liberation, the removal of all the weeds, rubble and vermin that want to attack tender buds of the plant . . . .” The goal of the study of history should be “to become mature and to flee from that paralyzing upbringing of the present age . . . .” And from Schopenhauer, from both the man and the philosophy, one must “gain insight into his own want and misery, into his own limitedness, so as then to learn the nature of his antidotes and consolations: namely, sacrifice of the ego, submission to the noblest ends, above all to those of justice and compassion.” (Schopenhauer as Educator, UM 142) “This is the root of all true culture; and if I understand by this the longing of man to be reborn as saint and genius, I know that one does not have to be a Buddhist to understand this myth.” (Schopenhauer as Educator, UM 142) It is the genius which is the end and meaning of culture, the cultivation of the great individual: “[O]ne may hear whether genius, the highest fruit of life, can perhaps justify life as such . . . .” (Schopenhauer as Educator, UM 146) Let’s make it even less subtle: “‘Mankind must work continually at the production of individual great men – that and nothing else is its task.’” (Schopenhauer as Educator, UM 161). This man I know, and he is Friedrich Nietzsche.
In closing, it should be noted that I have taken no quotations from, and in fact made no reference to, the fourth essay, Richard Wagner in Bayreuth. Partly this is because there is relatively little on culture itself compared to the other three (though it is far from empty), and it offers less in terms of new content (though again, new content is not lacking). In fact, it can perhaps be said that the first three essays themselves form the thesis and argument of the Meditations, and the fourth is kind of an odd one; Nietzsche is there, alright, but in this case the essay is primarily about Wagner, and the way he goes about it is rather unusual for him, especially considering the difficulty his relationship with Wagner was in at the time. Thus in the namely of scholarliness I reject the fourth Meditation because it does not agree with my thesis, that the essays form a coherent whole, at least in the background and developing message. Though that's not quite true, because as I said, Nietzsche is there, and he has a message; it’s just that, in this case, the message is subsumed by Nietzsche’s need to put forth one last hope in his relationship with Wagner. It wouldn’t last; Wagner publicly attacked Human, All Too Human, and after that Nietzsche had his own path to follow.
-----
That's Nietzsche. I imagine that in the future I will return to him with greater depth, but for now I'll leave him be. For the next couple days I will be spitting out Statements of Purpose like there's no tomorrow, as well as formalizing documentation and such, so that the better part of graduate school applications are behind me. Then I return to Heidegger, the later Heidegger to be specific. First is Discourse on Thinking. It's about fifty pages, so I can get something up in a relatively short time. Until then.
posted by Derek at 11:41 PM
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